Retro
The official game of ‘The Lion King’ and the real reason for its insane difficulty
Disney itself was responsible for making The Lion King video game so extraordinarily difficult as part of a peculiar marketing strategy.
The official video game of ‘The Lion King’ for Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo is not only one of the most remembered platformers of the mid-nineties for being a very good adaptation of the animated movie, but it was also infamous for how difficult it was. What many gamers did not know at the time was that its excessive difficulty was intentional, by direct order from Disney, with one goal in mind: to prevent gamers from being able to complete it by renting it, forcing them to buy it instead.
The Lion King game was so hard that you had to buy it instead of renting it
When The Lion King game was released in 1994, video game rentals were very popular in the United States, with large chains like Blockbuster renting not only movies but also games. However, Disney didn’t think it was a good idea for players to be able to complete one of their games during a rental period, so they asked Westwood Studios, the developer, to increase the difficulty of this video game to encourage users to buy it instead of renting it.
This was basically the main reason why a video game that was primarily aimed at children had such a high and unreasonable level of difficulty.
It was a platform title that, after a first level of reasonable difficulty in which we get to know the controls of the game and its peculiarities, from the second level (called “Can’t Wait to be the King”) the surprise jumps and we are offered a sadistic experience in which the player is penalized for the slightest mistake.
This level starts with a tricky platforming section where we have to jump over the heads of several giraffes over an abyss. There are also puzzles that consist of yelling at monkeys of a certain color to change the direction they are looking and thus throw us to the right place, and last but not least: sections where Simba is on the back of an ostrich and we have to avoid obstacles by ducking or jumping at the right time, although the collision detection could be improved.
The difficulty spike was so beastly that one of the developers apologized on Reddit almost two decades after the game’s release, explaining that this level should have been much easier, with no chance of dying and focused on the monkey puzzle.
The rest of the game was still complicated and more or less adhered to the standards of the time, but the main stumbling block players faced was the huge difference in complexity between the relatively easy first level and the brutal second level.