Disney, like so many companies that harvest children's hearts for money, are awash in opportunities to generate that buy-in to make sure they have a chance to pull someone's identity into their market profile forever. For me, the two that almost worked were Aladdin and The Lion King. The Lion King was so enormous in my childhood that in our music class, one year's production was The Lion King. I'm pretty sure it was the only production I really made it to? That's a bunch of other sad stories there. Anyways, the point is, I genuinely believe my ownership of the cartridge of this game is the thing that inoculated me against Disney Adult Disorder, as I don't know that any child could have touched this goddamn thing and held any affection for anything related to it after the fact.

This review applies to both 16-bit versions of this game, since I played them around the same time and there aren't too many major differences between them to my way of thinking. If it matters, I like the Genesis version a little better, since that was the console better able to realize what Virgin Interactive was going for.

Anywho, Virgin's Lion King is a game I think about a lot, as a consequence of what it is. The Lion King (the movie) was HUGE in my house growing up. Easily my favorite Disney movie, to the point where holding any other Disney over it, even masterpieces like Beauty and the Beast, is incomprehensible to me. Almost certainly my brother's favorite, too, and at the very least up there for everyone else. Even before I had access to "video games" and just had "computer games" to play with, The Lion King formed a huge part of my formational gaming experiences: Activity Center, Animated Storybook, Lion King 2's Active Play and Gamebreak, Hippo Hop and everything else in Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games... once my family started getting into console and handheld gaming, it was really only inevitable that the better-remembered Lion King video games would follow suit, with Virgin's efforts being the vanguard to all that.

Virgin's take on Aladdin made for one of the most important licensed titles of its era, if a bit understated these days in historical relevance. But it was enough to prompt Disney to renege on what had been Nintendo console exclusivity deal with Capcom and ask Virgin to produce all versions of the game. A separate studio handled primary development (Westwood, whom I mostly know for Eye of the Beholder) but production generally followed a similar approach as Virgin's Aladdin: Disney animators were tapped for spritework and backgrounds, while the good folks at Westwood handled the actual gameplay side of things.

Of every Disney licensed game, with one exception, this is easily the most important Disney game to who I am, mostly for my relationship with my brother. Dude loooooooves The Lion King, looooooooves that this video game existed, and loooooooooves to engage with it. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but ever since the Wii was first announced as the Nintendo Revolution, and we learned about the Virtual Console, my brother's #1 do-or-die wish was this game. All versions of The Lion King, actually, including the ultra-obscure NES release handled by Dark Studios. We're still waiting in NES Lion King to get its due, but I was pretty stoked to finally see the OTHER versions come out on modern consoles with that Disney Classics Collection (which is how I played it for this review). I dunno if my brother knows this collection exists - for reasons I'm not ready to divulge here, this is a difficult question to answer - but if he does, I know he would be happy that the 16-bit and Game Boy releases finally made a comeback.

Given how important The Lion King in general and this game in particular are to me, it hurts to admit it, but - Westwood wasn't able to recapture what Virgin was able to pull off with Aladdin. At least part of this is circumstantial, though. Lion King was on a tight timeline for its dev cycle, with only 6 months in the kiln, so some rough spots aren't that much of a surprise. This is why you have, for example, the notorious difficulty spike in "Can't Wait To Be King" - the dev team ran out of dev time but needed some way to keep the game from being an easy rental, so they padded. I haven't read any commentary to this effect, but I imagine this is also why "Simba's Return" is as tedious as it is - easy to pad out a maze if you gotta.

The Lion King by its nature also runs into a fairly typical issue that I think of as the "Quadruped Problem". Basically, it's inherently harder to come up with new, varied functions for a player character to do in a video game if they're quadrupedal (that is, walk on four legs and have no functional hands) than if they're bipedal (have two legs and presumably functional hands). This is the main reason why Insomniac stepped away from the Spyro franchise, for example - even by the third game, they ran out of things for Spyro to do and cheated by giving him (bipedal!) animal friends with varied functions. This isn't to say that there aren't games that make great use of quadrupedal protagonists - it's just a harder baseline to work with versus a humanoid avatar.

You can definitely feel this in The Lion King, particularly when comparing with Aladdin. Simba can jump and (eventually) claw-swipe for two moves, and he's working on his ROAR for a third. The game gets something from him climbing up surfaces, which is a fair thing to have a cat do. He tumbles, which... I guess that works. He can also swing off things? You can sort of feel that the team was trying to figure out how to pad out this moveset to satisfy a full-length game, which is how you ended up with stuff like Simba roaring to flip the monkeys, or all the beetle pick-ups to add some sort of variety to play. Compare this to Aladdin, who quite naturally climbs ropes, lobs apples, jumps around, and HE'S GOT A SWORD!

But there are some things I just can't reconcile. I've gone through the game several times, and I still have no clear idea of what I'm doing with the final Scar fight. A lot of the bosses are pretty weird, like that lava "boss" in "Be Prepared" I also DO NOT get the gorilla in "Hakuna Matata". Granted, I dunno what boss encounter you would place there, and you DEFINITELY need to represent that sequence somehow in this game, but still...

It's a cheap asset flip, but I kinda like that the boss to "The Pridelands" is just a normal lategame enemy. Always a sucker for that sort of design.

I don't think The Lion King is a very good game, but it is one I'm quite fond of for largely unrelated circumstances. Nothing has really come close to capturing what The Lion King makes me feel in the language of video games, but this is at least a decent effort. The music and animation conversions are all great, and I love how much of the original is still present here. Timon's "...it starts", placed out-of-context, is a weirdly memetic line for me that I find myself wanting to quote a lot, more for its video game use than its movie use. I love the use of "This Land" as the opening stage's background music - it's such an important track to defining the movie's early tone, but it's easy to lose track of it given it's not one of the vocal songs, so giving it a peppy remix helps bring it tonally to the same level as everything else.

Man, I love this game. I can't justify a high score, but I also can't justify a low score. Down the middle will have to do.

P.S. - Apparently, when Disney gave Virgin the license for The Lion King, one of their suggestions for a video game adaptation was a fighting game, in the style of Street Fighter II. I don't expect this would have been any good, particularly since Westwood had no experience with the genre, but I so wish I could see what that might've looked like.

Everything the light touches is our kingdom!
This was my favourite dos game back in the 90's, the majestic pc-dos soundtrack jingling tunes straight from the movie as the occasionally brutal, yet vibrant and diverse levels sets the tone just right as individual set pieces to our beloved tale.

Challenging and occasionally cheap (looking at you level 2), but at the same time forgiving enough with 1 ups and continues generously scattered about, increasingly so as you get to the final stretch of this otherwise short and bittersweet platformer.