Do you remember the very first video game you ever played? For many of us that probably seems so long ago that the actual answer has faded away. We may gravitate towards the first game we ever owned to answer the question, as it's a pretty easy benchmark. Or they might state that their first game was the first "noteworthy" title they ever played, a game that was particularly memorable not just to them but mayhaps to gaming history. Statistically speaking, we can't ALL have started with a Mario game, y'all. Some of us had to have started with, like, the Dora the Explorer game where she meets an ice princess. I do, however, actually remember the very first game I ever played. It was probably like 1996 or 97, I was barely capable of conscious thought, and I was being babysat at my aunt and uncle's house, either by them or by my cousins. Regardless, though, I was actually playing with my cousins at the time, and they had a Sega Genesis that they allowed me to toy around with in their room. Now, there's no way that my cousins would've let me pick a game to play, I was like 3, but they thankfully knew exactly what I liked. I was, after all, autistic, and so I was very very loud about the things that I liked. And like most 90s kids, one of the things that I very vocally loved was the Lion King.
The Lion King was, for many years, my favorite movie. I probably first saw it when I was not even old enough to register that I had, and it quickly became child Me's entire personality. At least until a game we'll be talking about in a couple entries came along. I was obsessed with the Lion King, I've been a major animal lover my entire life and the Lion King was probably THE piece of media that contributed to that love more than anything. I would not stop talking about it. I remember when I was a kid I would try and memorize the soundtrack lyrics so I could perform them for my half-siblings when they would be around. Somewhere deep in my brother's memory banks is probably a haunting memory of the time I sat him down and sang the entire soundtrack, front to back, in the loudest, most 4 year old singing voice possible. It was the origin of my love of animation, my love of musicals, even my love of Broadway. I saw The Lion King stage show the very first time it came into my city on tour (I was probably too young) and it has been the stage show I have seen the most in my entire life. I sadly had to throw out the merchandise my mom bought me back when I was a kid, actually, I had a watch I've been holding onto since I was a kid and the plastic band completely snapped in the last move without me realizing.
So as you can imagine the idea that I could play this movie that I loved so much was mind blowing to this younger version of me. To be clear, I was too young to understand the concept of a "video game", I was like a toddler. I probably assumed it was just another toy to play with. If I ever made it past the first level, which this was long enough ago that there's very little chance I did, it was probably on the back of my cousins helping me. But that didn't really matter to child me, I was just able to run around as my boy Simba in Pride Rock. What more could one ask for? There's something that is literally impossible to recapture about the experience of playing games when you're too young to understand them, when you just view them as toys. It is perhaps the most magical point in your life when you're playing video games, that point where you are unable to beat the first level of a game and you don't even care because even that feels like an impossibly deep world to explore. It was only important that I was able to play this thing that I loved so deeply.
Thankfully, my cousins also knew all the cheats so I was able to keep throwing myself into the first level without having to worry about my playtime being interrupted. Granted, I was just throwing myself at the first obstacle over and over again, not really putting together how to win against it. I think maybe I probably figure out eventually that you could hop on the first beetle you encounter? There's no way I would've ever beaten that porcupine, though, I never would've figured out at like 3 or 4 that I could roar at it to flip it over. But again, it doesn't matter, because I was just having fun. It's weird, because I do have a memory of making it to "I Just Can't Wait to be King", the game's infamous second level where the gloves come off. But I don't think I ever did, I've played this game so many times throughout my life trying to finish it that I'm probably misremembering. But who knows, maybe I figured it out and my brain isn't lying to me. Either way, the Lion King very quickly became my favorite "toy" when I visited my cousins, and we would play with it probably every time I went over there. I have the sneaking suspicion that I played with their copy of Lion King for the Genesis more often than they did, my cousins were not really the type to play video games constantly, one did band which ate up most of his free time and the other was Mr. Popular so he was always running around.
However, my cousins were thankfully better at games than me, given the development of cognitive reasoning, so I did get to see the later stages of the game through watching them. They were, in particular, very excited to show me the Stampede stage, the game's fourth stage and if my mind was already blown from being able to play my favorite movie, being able to play a scene from that movie basically as it was in the movie just took it to the next level. This is actually the most distinctive memory I have of the Lion King, my cousin excitedly going "if you think the game is cool now, watch this" or something to that effect and then playing until they got to this level to see how wowed I was. It was like the first time I remember connecting with a video game, seeing the Stampede level, and is probably my second earliest gaming related memory? My first was one year when a different aunt and uncle were throwing a New Year's Party and all the kids sat around and took turns playing Donkey Kong Country but like, I was literally 2 I'm pretty sure so I didn't play and instead just looked at the funny Monkey on the TV screen and probably giggled.
Unfortunately, the Lion King would leave me not too long after these brief memories. It was already 96 or 97 maybe, the PlayStation 1 was out, and my cousins would upgrade to that. The Genesis would get relegated to a forgotten shelf of the entertainment center, then to a container in the basement, and then sold. I would myself get my own game consoles and not even really know how to ask for this Lion King game I loved so dearly, not that I could play it even if I had it. I had an N64, and it was on SNES/Genesis. Those consoles had long since been sold, my older brothers becoming "too old" for video games. But, it would re-enter my life in a big way in my late teens. There was a brief time in the late 00s/early 10s where I flirted with being a Let's Player. As previously mentioned on this blog, I was homeschooled and had a lot of free time because I would finish school in like half a day, and so a lot of that time was spent looking up gaming related content on the internet. This series is going to reveal a lot of embarrassing pieces of content I used to enjoy, I can't wait. But I got really into Let's Plays in particular, the original style not the Pewdiepie/Markiplier style that would become what the genre is associated with nowadays. And I wanted to do them myself, it seemed fun. So I downloaded Hypercam and never registered it, I asked my parents for a camera for Christmas not understanding that I needed a thing called a "Capture card" to get good gaming footage, and I struck out to make Let's Plays.
Now, I never finished a Let's Play. I had a bad habit of getting way in over my head with a project and then realizing it a few episodes in and stopping. I did a lot of "blind playthroughs" of old SNES RPGs, namely Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, only to immediately lose steam on them like 10 episodes in because I didn't know what I was doing and also the work was bad. I save scummed on an emulator over and over and did things like "take phone calls in the middle of recording", which I also recorded post-commentary so there was no reason to leave that in but boy did I. Embarrassing. Anyways, my very first Let's Play on this channel (none of these videos exist anymore, kind of sad about that but you know, it happens) was the Lion King. I figured it was only right, the very first game I ever played being the game that started my YouTube career. Ignore I had done like 30 slideshow videos of fake Smash movesets. I'll talk about my Smash project someday. Anyways, I booted up Unregistered Hypercam 2 and got to recording the Lion King for... Super Nintendo? Yeah, I don't know why, I forgot I played it originally on Genesis, I was like so certain that I played the SNES version when I was a toddler. Which does not make sense because there's a game we'll be getting to later in this series that I also played at that cousin's house, and that is literally a first party SEGA title. Memory lying to me, I swear.
I'm sure people who don't know the Lion King have so far been like "oh this is a lovely story, this is so cute". And those that DO know the Lion King have been like "oh no. OH NO." The Lion King is one of the many very good licensed Disney games that came out during the third and fourth generations of video game consoles, but among that class it is probably the most infamous. While the Capcom suite of Disney games tended to be a bit on the "tough but fair" side of things, the Lion King was made by the studio that took over after the Capcom license expired, Virgin Interactive. Virgin tended to be way more cruel. They were more directly under Disney's thumb with way less negotiating power in regards to game development and Disney was literally just telling them to make the game harder up until it was ready to launch. You know that old theory that games were difficult back in the day because companies wanted to combat game rentals by inflating playtime? That was literally what happened during the Virgin days, Disney was telling them to add more puzzles or kick up the difficulty over and over. The infamous monkey puzzle in level 2 was added at the last minute, as Disney was mandating more playtime and they didn't have time to add more levels.
So I was basically doing a first playthrough of a very difficult game for the internet to judge me, using a mouse and keyboard because, again, I emulated everything. I am not a PC gamer, even to this day I kind of play games on my PC while gritting my teeth a bit. I did not grow up on mouse and keyboard, I do not feel comfortable doing it, and outside of management sims and point and clicks, if I HAVE to use a mouse and keyboard I am probably just not playing that game. And with the Lion King, you have to be VERY precise. It is a game that will have you jumping to tiny platforms that you can barely stand on, having to play it on a keyboard is absurd as a first time. I was also too dumb to figure out how to hook up a controller to my PC, or how to even get one. It was pre-Bluetooth so hooking up controllers to your PC was a process if you didn't have, like, a 360. Which I didn't because I was hard into my Nintendo fanboy era when this was all happening.
It should not surprise you, I did not beat the game during this Let's Play. Not only did I not beat the game, I had three entire episodes devoted to one platforming challenge. I shouldn't have done that, in hindsight, especially since that was the end of the Let's Play, I should've just stopped it when it was clear I wasn't beating it after 30 minutes of trying. However, I got shockingly far. A combination of save scumming and me surprisingly locking in at some points (I actually had a good run of I Just Can't Wait to Be King, which is a huge difficult spike, I got that platforming down and only lost at the ostrich parts) meant that I made it all the way to Hakuna Matata. Yeah, the platforming challenge was not the ostriches in I Just Can't Wait to be King or the tiny platforms in the Elephant Graveyard, it was the waterfall. I just could not seem to make any actual progress up the waterfall, I was probably playing too safe and not trusting my jumps but it was just a war of attrition. I would literally do a dozen jumps in a row only to end up at the exact same ledge I started from. If you've played this game, you can relate, it is the canon experience. Once again, I recorded this failure, edited it into videos, and uploaded it onto YouTube. I just thought it would be okay because I sped up the footage and played Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" over it.
Unfortunately, the Lion King did not pan out at that time. Again, none of my Let's Play games panned out, I got way in over my head and didn't make significant progress on any of them, except for Kingdom Hearts, which I got all the way to Neverland in. That YouTube channel had to be nuked because I got everyone mad at me from trolling too hard and I was suffering the consequences. It's a shame too, I kind of wish that work still existed even if it was truly terrible so people could laugh at how much of an idiot I was back then. I would eventually return to that run and get a bit farther, I made it all the way to the very first adult Simba level which is honestly probably my favorite level in the game? I love the vibes of it and I love their crunchy 16-bit rendition of Under the Stars as goofy as it sounds. Unfortunately I would not beat it on that run-through either because I could not mash fast enough to defeat the final obstacle, a gauntlet of the Leopard enemies, and so I wasn't able to beat the level and move on. I guess fast enough isn't the right term, it's way more of a rhythm thing, just mashing means you will die. It doesn't help that the first adult Simba level also sees you lose all the upgrades you unlocked as young Simba so the safety net you've sewn for yourself is suddenly taken away.
I put the Lion King down for many years, likely 12? That sounds right. A dozen years passed where I just didn't really find the space for a playthrough of the Lion King. Part of it was that I got really weird. I bought into a lot of very weird ideas about emulation being a net negative, the value of physical gaming over digital, I grew an obsession with having my games "legally". You know, just really anti-consumerist viewpoints which behave as if spending money is a moral imperative and blames those who lose out on their games for going digital as if it is a moral failing on their part rather than a call to action for better consumer protections. You ever notice how the people who are the loudest about the value of ownership are the people who directly benefit from people purchasing old games "legally" because it drives up demand which means if they choose to sell their dragon hoard they can turn a major profit. Funny that. I digress. I spent a lot of that time playing more modern games. For a while I was big into my Nintendo fanboy era and so really I wasn't playing modern games, I played Arkham City like two years later than everyone else on a port with shoved in controller gimmicks to justify its existence. But eventually I got a PS4 and started to fill in the gaps of what I had missed the past decade or so by being such a hardcore Nintendo guy. That combined with the decreasing presence that retro gaming had in my circle meant that returning to the first game I ever played became lower and lower on the priority list.
That is until 2023, my very first year doing Game Clearing in roughly the same iteration I'm doing now. There have been some nuances year-in and year-out, I initially didn't track my start and end dates and obviously I wasn't doing the blog in 2023, but more or less the way I do things now started in 2023. My earlier game clearing vibe that year was very slapdash, just kind of picking random games from either my shelf or my NSO service and playing through them. If I remember correctly something had happened that previously year that made me throw out my TV stand and so I was kind of without a TV. So basically everything I played was on Switch or on my PC, and again I hate PC gaming and it is only after 3 years of doing it that I don't complain about it constantly when I do it. And so, pulling random games off my shelf and out of my digital library, I decided it was finally time to tackle the Lion King, which I had gotten via the Disney Classic Games Collection at this point. I hadn't yet decided I was cool with non-official emulation, 2023 was probably the year I was legitimately coming down from my "forever physical" mindset.
Now, I was admittedly a little hesitant to play the Lion King. I always think I'm going to hate retro platformers more than I end up actually hating them. In 2023 I had long since stopped being a big retro game guy, I don't hate retro games now but I'm very touch and go about them. Like with all things, my opinions on them are always evolving and are very much on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes I love a game I would probably otherwise hate (Gunstar Heroes) just because it hit me at the right time, you know? But I have played enough classic platformers to know that usually the harder ones don't do a lot for me. I tend to find excessive difficulty boring, I acknowledge its importance in the retro game space especially and, don't get me wrong, I totally understand why other people find this compelling. I get the gameplay loop of hitting a wall and wanting to tear it down and that driving you. But revisiting older games nowadays for me can be very hard, especially if the game is very hard. The Lion King, of course, is infamously hard, with its brutality being one of the first things anyone knows about it. So I went into this playthrough a bit cautious, ready to have my heart broken.
Y'all, I love the Lion King. I was fully surprised by how truly good this game is. Now, mind you, I'm biased. This is an adaptation of one of my favorite movies of all time, a movie that was my literal favorite for the first 16 years of my life until I saw Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, I know, terrible movie to overtake The Lion King, what can I say. As well, I obviously have a history with the Lion King, this game has been an important fixture of my life, but that doesn't really mean anything. One of the biggest posts on this blog is literally me talking about how, despite a long history with the game "Banjo-Kazooie", I ended up hating it. Like, I was assuming, going into it, that the Lion King would probably just be a very mid platformer that I would be glad I played but kind of shrug off ultimately. One of the many MANY games I play every year and go "well, you know. It's alright." But no, I adored the Lion King, I thought it was great.
A pretty big reason is admittedly how effectively it captures the style and tone of the movie. It beautifully recaptures the style of some of the most iconic scenes in the original film, from the bright, colorful visuals of "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" creating this super fun and kind of trippy level that's a visual showcase; to the more melancholic look and tone of something like Simba running through the jungle chasing Rafiki. It's funny, in my memory the film looks way more like the former, like that's the look I associate with the Lion King. Very vibrant, very colorful, very light. But playing through the game, it really hit me how melancholic a lot of that film is. You spend way more of that game in levels with muted color palettes and kind of solemn music. That's correct, of course, that is what the film is. It's not a happy film, it's very grand and epic and sad. I just find it amusing how my memory latched onto the moments of levity just because I saw it when I was so young. But the game is just such a wonderful recapture of the movie, at some points it even looks like actual movie animation. Virgin Interactive was good at that, their Aladdin game on the Genesis is largely considered the better version because it effectively recaptures the flow of the movie in a way that the Capcom game doesn't.
But also, the Lion King is just a fun platformer. Its reputation as an exceptionally difficult game is totally justified, don't get me wrong, it is a very difficult game. I will fully admit I had to use the rewind and save state functionality contained within the collection numerous times, I am very bad at most games and as such try to use every tool available to me to get through. But it's also just incredibly fun. Like the platforming is rough and very precise but it's very satisfying, the amount of secrets hidden in each level make them fun to test different paths in, when you finally unlock combat in the later sections it becomes a very fun sort of hack-and-slash. It's just a very fun game, I don't know if it is necessarily a "must-play" game in the SNES library anymore, it certainly was at a time. It is very difficult and can be very frustrating and I think without the obvious connection that you might have to the source material and/or an appreciation for retro platformers, the Lion King probably isn't worth playing. But truly, I adore it.
And so the first story ends. The shadow that the first game I ever played cast over me finally dissipating. But there will be more stories to tell, more games to explore. I really want to turn this into an ongoing series, I feel like it'd be nice to go over my gaming history in this way. I hope you all enjoyed this one, and stay tuned for the next entry, where we get a bit more aquatic with it.
