D23 might be over, but another surprising Disney announcement has hit the internet – Sega Genesis games Aladdin and The Lion King are receiving remasters. Hurrah!
News of this unexpected surprise came from the YouTube channel GameXplain. The hosts of the show managed to get hold of a photograph taken at GameStopCon which featured the box’s artwork, the words ‘Coming FALL’ and the consoles it’s being released on at the bottom of the screen (Xbox One, PS4, and Switch). Then, Polygon revealed the goodies we’ll see in this collection.
Aladdin and The Lion King will reportedly be playable in both their original and remastered editions, both available on the CD. Not only will the MegaDrive versions of these games be available on the disc, but there will also be the GameBoy, Super GameBoy, and SNES versions. Well, scratch that last one out for Aladdin – only The Lion King will have its SNES release in this collection.
But perhaps most interestingly, Aladdin will have a new ‘final cut’ as well as the 1993 trade show demo of the original release.
New features for Aladdin and The Lion King include being able to fast-forward or rewind to any part of the game you desire as well as letting the AI take over, showing you how to finish the level (given the infamous difficulty of The Lion King, this may be a necessity!). There is also a level select function.
These 16-bit classics represent a golden age in Disney movie-licensed videogames. Both games were critical and commercial successes. According to the co-founder of Westwood Louis Castle, The Lion King “sold 4.5 million copies or something ridiculous like that—the best-selling Westwood title to-date”. Castle’s number may very well be overexaggerated though since Disney’s Aladdin sold over four million copies, which earned it a spot as the Genesis’s (or MegaDrive’s) third best-selling game of all time.
Aladdin, in particular, was so beloved that Castle had pitched the idea of a sequel to Disney, but the idea was shot down. It would have featured pre-rendered 3D models as opposed to the hand-drawn sprites of the original game.
