Disney1994’s The Lion King is one of the most fondly-remembered Disney films of all time. It also spawned a tie-in game for the SNES and SEGA Genesis that was notoriously difficult. Like, far, far harder than a game based on a kid’s movie about talking animals ever needed to be.
Ask anyone in their mid-to-late 20’s who played the game as a kid back in the day, and chances are they’ll spend a good few hours telling you all about the real horrors attempting to beat The Lion King, as if they were recalling a particularly harrowing war flashback. It messed a lot of us up.
Disney Good news then, as a new leak strongly suggests that The Lion King, along with the charming and much less difficult Aladdin, are getting remastered and re-released for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 as part of a Disney classics collection.
The news was first leaked by Twitter user @wolverinefactor (awesome name), who attended GameStop Con where a boxed version of the collection was reportedly shown off to attendees. GameXplain later confirmed the news themselves, showing off an image of the collection’s marketing material and case designs.
According to the report, both The Lion King and Aladdin will be playable in their original resolutions, but there’ll also be the option to play in a remastered 1080p resolution. For the real diehard fans out there, you’ll even have the option to choose between the original SNES and Genesis soundtracks.
Gematsu later confirmed a number of additional features which are fairly standard for re-releases of classic games. According to those guys, you’ll be able to create save states and fast forward/rewind to any point in either game, which should make The Lion King manageable. Finally.
Disney We’ve still yet to hear an official announcement on this remastered collection, but Gematsu and GameXplain claim to have confirmed the reports with reputable sources. Also, given that Aladdin and The Lion King both received their own big-screen remakes this year, it’d make sense for Disney to revisit the classic video game tie-ins now.
Various reports have claimed that pre-orders for the collection are set to open today (Wednesday, August 28), so we shouldn’t have long to wait before we know for sure whether or not it’s time to unleash the pain of The Lion King onto a new generation.
Disney You think losing in Fortnite is hard, kids? Try dying just as you get to the end of The Lion King’s waterfall level. Let’s see you dab to that.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.