The Lion King

About The Lion King

The Lion King (1994) is Westwood Studios' SNES and Genesis platformer of the Disney film, drawn by Disney's own animators, famous for its beauty and for a difficulty its director later admitted was meant to beat rental periods.

The Lion King in Depth

Simba follows the events of the film, first as a cub and later as an adult. Young Simba mainly defeats enemies by jumping on them and has a roar, drawn from a refilling meter, that stuns enemies and solves puzzles. Grown-up Simba gains combat moves such as scratching, mauling and throwing. Lives are lost by running out of health, falling into pits, water or lava, or being hit by rolling boulders and falling stalactites, and checkpoints mark restart points. Continues, collected as Circle of Life icons, let the player restart the last stage reached.

Bugs restore health, rarer ones permanently extend the health and roar meters, and black spiders hurt. Hidden bugs open bonus stages: as Pumbaa, the player catches falling bugs until one hits the bottom or he eats a bad one, and as Timon, the player hunts bugs against the clock while avoiding spiders, earning extra lives and continues. Two levels, Hakuna Matata and Be Prepared, were adapted from scenes cut from the finished film.

Making The Lion King

Westwood developed the SNES and Genesis versions between January and July 1994 for Virgin Interactive, adapting the film's songs and orchestrations for the music, while other studios made the MS-DOS, Master System, Game Gear, NES and Game Boy versions. Of its $20 million budget, $8 million went on marketing. The SNES version sold 1.27 million copies in the US, it was the third best-selling game across formats in the UK at Christmas 1994, and Castle put total sales at about 4.5 million.

GamePro praised its "movie-quality graphics, animations, and sounds" but found the gameplay repetitive and the difficulty uneven, while Next Generation said that though much harder than Aladdin it was "never unfair or frustrating". Entertainment Weekly gave the SNES version an A, likening adult Simba's fights to "a PBS nature documentary", and EGM thought the Game Gear version controlled better than the 16-bit ones. It was re-released in Disney Classic Games: Aladdin and The Lion King in 2019.