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Hi! On Friday, I asked you all if you’d show up if I did a reddit AMA on Friday, September 19, but I messed up the date and wrote 18th instead. It’s the 19th, starting at 10am ET. If you can’t make it at the start, no worries — I’ll likely keep it open for a few hours to accommodate for different time zones. More to come! — Dan
Why Was This Video Game So Hard to Beat?
The mid-1980s through the mid-1990s were a golden age for “platformers,” a genre of video games you played on your Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis (my platform of choice), or PlayStation. Some of the games of that era — Super Mario Bros., Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mortal Kombat — have spawned their own franchises, extending well beyond the video game space. Entire two-dimensional universes came to life for kids (and yes, adults) in the United States and around the world. And IP rights holders of all stripes were getting in on the action. In the 1990s, for example, Disney adapted almost all of its major animated films into a video game, allowing fans of the movies to play as their favorite characters. It was a huge financial boon for Disney, and the entertainment industry as a whole.
But if you were a little kid hoping to have an easy time exploring the world of Simba in The Lion King video game, you were in for a rude surprise. The game, despite ostensibly being meant for the same kids who loved the song Circle of Life, was infamously hard. Here’s how video game writer Nicole Carpenter summarized her experience playing the game:
I’ve played the first three levels of The Lion King on Super Nintendo hundreds of times. And that’s not an exaggeration.
My mom bought me the game shortly after it was released in 1994. It was months after The Lion King’s debut in theaters. I had just turned six, and I was still alternating between delight and devastation — The animals sing! But Simba’s dad dies — each time I thought about the movie.
The 16-bit platformer largely followed the progression of the movie, beginning with Simba as a cub, and following his path into adulthood through exile. Simba becomes a more capable lion — acquiring new abilities, like a booming roar over his baby lion growl— as the game continues.
Unfortunately for me, The Lion King was a devastatingly hard video game. I’d never, not once, reached a level where I could play as adult Simba. I always gave up in frustration.
Her experience isn’t unique — many kids of her age and even older couldn’t beat the game. Why would the game developers create a game for kids that kids couldn’t beat? That seems like a bad business decision.
But it probably wasn’t. And you can blame another hallmark of the 1990s for that: Blockbuster Video. Families spent a lot of time at Blockbuster and other video rental places during that decade; as one Blockbuster franchisee asserted in an interview with Vice, “about half of American households were in a video store every week, and VCRs were in about 90 percent of homes.” Renting movies and watching them in the comfort of your home was a weekly tradition for many families. As video game consoles became increasingly common, Blockbuster and others also began to rent out video games — you could borrow a game from Blockbuster for about five bucks, and it’d be yours for two or three days.
Game publishers hated that. A Blockbuster-owned game could be played by dozens of kids but only yield one sale for the developers, and that was bad for business. So when it became time to make The Lion King video game, they were instructed to do something unexpected: make the game so hard to the point where it may not even be fun. In 2014, Greg Rice, a video game developer for a studio called Double Fine, sat down with Louis Castle, a lead developer on The Lion King, and the two played through the game together. (Here’s a link to the video, and it goes right to the relevant part of their conversation.) When they got to the notoriously hard part alluded to by Carpenter above, Rice jokes that “this was probably a stopping point for a lot of people.” Castle took the opportunity to explain why:
The monkey puzzle was meant to be [relatively easy]. What happened was, at the time, Blockbuster had a rental product that just came out. Disney had a rule across all its products that [consumers] couldn’t get past a certain percentage of the game in a certain period of time. [Game designers] had to make [the game] longer and more complicated. [ . . . ] The reason we had to do it was the rental market — people would rent a game and if they got a certain distance in the game, the metrics from Disney said they wouldn’t buy the game.
Castle, in the same clip, apologizes for this — he realized that the game was less fun as a result. But The Lion King has lots of fans regardless. In 2010, game publication IGN released its list of the top 100 SNES Games of All Time, and The Lion King came in at number 66.
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More About The Lion King
Today’s Bonus fact: Mufasa, the king (and father of future king Simba) in The Lion King movie, was voiced by actor James Earl Jones — and you probably knew that even if you didn’t, because Jones’ voice acting work is iconic. Mufasa’s wife, Simba’s mother, and the queen of the pride, Sarabi, was voiced by Madge Sinclair, a lesser-known but still accomplished actress. This wasn’t the first time Jones and Sinclair worked together as king and queen — the two played the regal parents of Prince Akeem (played by Eddie Murphy) in the 1988 film Coming to America. Whether that makes Akeem and Simba siblings is up to you.
From the Archives: The Lion King and the Secret (But Not Actually R-Rated) Message: It doesn’t say what people think it says.
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And thanks! — Dan