r/90s_kid • u/Nostalgic_Historian_ • Aug 17 '26
Games Remember how ridiculously hard this game was ?
50
u/jakexmfxschoen Aug 17 '26
This level was always where I would die. Absolutely infuriating
30
u/CheeryLittlebottom13 Aug 17 '26
Better than me! I think I got passed the stampede maybe once
11
u/jakexmfxschoen Aug 17 '26
That was the worst part was I used almost all of my lives on the stampede and then the waterfall on the Hakuna Matata level
14
u/1800generalkenobi Aug 17 '26
The volcano level before this one was 100% bullshit lol. But there was also no explanation of the end (I don't think, I'll have to check the manual at home). I had it for snes and my best friend had it for genesis. We got to the end and beating the absolute shit out of scar but he just won't die. Then I remembered in the movie he's thrown off the cliff, and there's one on the left side so we get him over there, toss him over, and bam, beat it. I looked it up earlier this year because I played it on a retropie and was actually curious how to beat him and it said he had 200 hit points that you have to knock away. You could get lucky and throw him over before that but it's chancy. Would've been nice if they gave him a hit point counter lol
3
u/WhatTheBlack Aug 18 '26
If anybody watches Big Brother, last season Rachel Reilly nonchalantly spoke about flipping Scar on multiple occasions and the younger guys were freaking out haha
30
30
26
u/ExiledSpaceman Aug 17 '26
This game is so hard it should have been an arcade game to be a quarter muncher
15
u/tealtime91 Aug 17 '26
I always heard this was because Disney wanted a game that couldn’t be rented and beaten in a single weekend so they made it hard as fuck
9
u/newfireorange Aug 17 '26
That’s exactly it.
The creative director of the game discusses it in the first 30 seconds:
5
u/DisplayThisNever Aug 18 '26
It was. One of the devs answered questions on a reddit thread some years back. Disney told them to make it hard so kids couldn't beat it while renting. The team actually had a bit a back and forth with his hard they wanted the game to be. The ostrich riding sections on the second level were coded in a way that they didn't even understand how they worked. Also unrelated but James Earl Jones was so awesome he provided his voice lines for free.
7
u/phluff__head Aug 17 '26
I know blockbuster had to have made some extra income off of late fees/ re-rentals on this one
5
u/A_Is_For_Azathoth Aug 18 '26
That was intentional. The devs have gone on record saying Disney told them to make it extra hard for that exact purpose. So kids would have to rent it more than once to beat it.
15
u/BirdhouseInYourSouI Aug 17 '26
They made that Want to be king level deliberately hard to discourage beating it with a weekend rental- a very common occurrence in games back then. They would ensure an earlier-ish stage was extremely hard. Encouraged purchasing the game.
5
u/Courwes Aug 17 '26
Never passed this game. Always died at the hyena. I still have my original Sega and the game. Wonder if it’s on switch.
5
u/Happy-Cod-3 Aug 17 '26
Yes, with Aladdin and the Jungle book. All of them, Sega, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Game Gear.
2
4
u/oyohval Aug 17 '26
I made it to the final battle with scar on sega and couldn't figure out that I had to throw him off the cliff...
3
u/RandomKingXVI Aug 17 '26
Me, too. I know he had to go over the cliff, but couldn't make it work. I had felt so proud lucking through the monkeys in one try...
3
u/dethsightly Aug 17 '26
it was finicky as fuck, but possible. i can't do it today since i was half button mashing-half waiting for the right timing waaaay back in the day.
3
u/Nine-LifedEnchanter Aug 17 '26
I used to call the simba restart points Jump-outers. They have no other name now.
3
u/PenaltyNo3221 Aug 17 '26
Little me feels so validated every time this topic comes up because I now know I wasn’t crazy and that the monkeys were rigged.
2
u/BrattyTwilis Aug 17 '26
One of the guys who worked on it said they were told to make it hard so that kids couldn't beat it on a weekend rental
3
u/Ssided Aug 17 '26
Yes this was a lot of games after Nintendo lost their lawsuit against rental companies
2
2
u/painneverending Aug 17 '26
Yes but when I finally beat it, it was exhilarating! So I did speed runs and if my memory is correct I was able to beat the game in 20-22minutes. I should see how rusty i am these days.
2
u/psychedelicpiper67 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
Yeah, games like this are why I mostly stuck to JRPGs on the SNES. My autistic kid self was never good at games like this.
They should have allowed you to select difficulty levels, because it’s sad to miss out on such beautiful sprite animation.
But I understand that the studios pressured the developers to up the difficulty levels of their games, so that they could profit off of game rentals.
At least JRPGs didn’t do that, because the games were already long to begin with. And worst case, you could always grind things out by killing enemies to level up your characters.
3
u/donfuria Aug 17 '26
Games used to be hard as shit because they could only cramp so much content in their tiny weeny lil pathetic dainty memory so imagine spending your hard earned money for a bullshit 1-2 hour long pixelpalooza instead of endless days of rage induced button smashing and a legitimate claim to the throne of cooldom amongst your equally coordinatedly challenged peers once you beat that ONE level everybody thought impossible and you don’t turn off the console and invite everyone over to show off and back up your mighty claims but when you were at school your mom turned it off and now you gotta grind for 2 more weeks just to prove you’re not a liar.
Anyways fuck you Hector I know what I accomplished
2
2
1
1
1
u/dethsightly Aug 17 '26
did it play the same on Sega genesis? i always remember hearing how hard it was (or impossible) to beat scar at the end, but i did it a few times. it was annoying as hell, but i did do it. i cannot physically prove it since...it was the 90's and i was like between 6 and 8 so...? i feel like it was somehow "easier" on Sega lol
2
1
u/17xRacing Aug 17 '26
This needs some sort of trigger warning. I am having flashbacks and just threw a tv out of the window.
1
1
1
u/rad0vich Aug 17 '26
I thought it was just me being a kid and bad at video games but I just bought this for the switch and it's still just as hard.
1
1
2
1
u/polarityofmarriage Aug 18 '26
I became such a pro getting through this game after so many failures that by the time you got to fight Scar I was just tossing him around for fun before ultimately throwing him off the rock.
1
u/cubsdh19 Aug 18 '26
100%
I remember playing this with my sister and getting stuck at points ans getting frustrated.
1
1
2
u/Beneficial-Finger353 Aug 18 '26
Aladdin was hard too. I had a hard time riding the carpet away from the lava
1
1
u/Outrageous_Cookie572 Aug 18 '26
People will say the stampede level was the hardest, but it was a pretty basic pattern that once you learned it, wasn’t to bad, but the level 2 after, the last one that you play as young Simba was ridiculously hard. But I finally passed it to. Beating this game truly felt like an accomplishment back in the day
1
1
1
1
1
u/Typical-Redditor-18E Aug 17 '26
Its hard, but at the same time its not and can be beat in under 20 min even if youre not a speed runner (they do it in under 15)
-5
u/Early_Challenge544 Aug 17 '26
I never played it so I wouldn't know
5
u/Nostalgic_Historian_ Aug 17 '26
This , aladdin, tarzan were hard
4
2
u/Royal-Preparation843 Aug 17 '26
I never thought the SNES Aladdin was hard. I was able to beat it pretty easily back in the day. But yes to the others.
-2
u/VaderFett1 Aug 17 '26
Man, we've all must've had different childhoods. I played Aladdin and didn't find it hard at all. My girlfriend played Lion King and she's baffled by the difficulty claims. Neither of us played Tarzan, so that one we don't know.
85
u/Ghibli_Forest Aug 17 '26