The 5 best, and 5 weirdest, Disney games of all time

One of Disney’s first outings into gaming was a match clearly made in digital heaven: Bally Midway’s adaptation of “whoops, got sucked inside a video game” feature Tron. Rather than adapt any one element of Jeff Bridges’ battle against the Master Control Program, though, designer Bill Adams attempted to do them all, with the game divided between four distinct mini-games. (A fifth, based off the “murder Frisbee” portions of the film, was released the next year as Discs Of Tron.) Some of these sequences are more successful than others—the two where you play as Bridges, running around in the mainframe, are undeniably weaker, for instance. But you could (and people have) made whole games out of the brilliant Light Cycles mini-game, which transforms the basic “lay down walls behind you” gameplay of Snake into a high-stakes multiplayer deathmatch.

The Capcom Disney Afternoon games from the late ’80s and early ’90s are fondly remembered to this day, for a pretty obvious reason: They’re shockingly well-made titles that were being created by one of the best studios to ever work on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which just happened to be branded around Disney’s then-new library of shows. We could pick a couple of different games out of this batch to hold up—the Chip ‘N’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers games are fascinating attempts to do very early co-op gaming, for instance—but it’s hard to beat the original DuckTales. Building an entire game around the capabilities of Scrooge McDuck’s cane (including an instantly iconic pogo jump that sends you bouncing through levels like a very wealthy madman) was a stroke of brilliance; even if the game occasionally collapses into overly punishing platforming, its rock-solid gameplay, bright colors, and legendary soundtrack clearly cement it as one of Disney’s masterpieces. (Not that you have to take our word for it; the recent Disney Afternoon Collection collects this, and all the rest of the Disney Afternoon games, in one place, along with plenty of great quality of life additions.)

It’s a strange irony that all of the things that make Mickey Mouse functionally inert as a character—his endlessly cheerful attitude, static personality, and basic inability to change—make him a great video game protagonist. (It’s not like Mario is exactly celebrated for his dynamic inner life.) Nowhere was that clearer than in Sega’s Castle Of Illusion and its various sequels and handheld Game Gear spin-offs, which drop Da Mouse into fantastical worlds and bizarre scenarios, using magic tricks (and an occasional assist from his buddy Donald) to overcome his strange trips through the looking glass. Beautifully animated, and pitched to be complete-able by even quite young Mickey fans, the Illusion games are still fondly remembered (and occasionally recreated) to this day. (Its rival series on the Super Nintendo, Capcom’s Magical Quest, had a less impactful legacy, but might be even better, incorporating a nifty “costume swap” mechanic that allowed players to trade out powers as needed.)

Even when Disney games don’t play perfectly, they almost always look amazing, pushing the technological limits of whatever system they happen to appear on. Two great cases in point are the game adaptations of two of the company’s biggest cinematic hits of the early ’90s, released on 16-bit consoles by Virgin Interactive. Both Aladdin and The Lion King feature some of the smoothest animation you’re ever likely to see out of the Super Nintendo or Genesis, with colorful recreations of iconic locations. Sure, both games are sometimes deeply frustrating, especially as players progress deeper into their blockbuster stories. (Whoops, we just gave ourselves another flashback to the goddamned Cave Of Wonders sequence.) But they’re also gorgeous examples of the then-state of the art, ably translating both the look and the sound of their source material to console screen. (Virgin also adapted The Jungle Book, by the by; see also, in the “plays messy, but looks amazing” category, Mickey Mania, an early game from Lego studio Traveler’s Tales that attempted to chart the full course of Mickey’s animated history.)

You can’t really talk about Disney and gaming without talking about Kingdom Hearts. Square-Enix’s marriage of classic Disney brands with its own particular taste for convoluted fantasy weirdness has become memetically complicated at this point, a mish-mash of Heartless and Nobodies and Organziations and also, for some reason, Mulan is there. But wipe all that cruft away, and a truth stands revealed: That the Kingdom Hearts games are often great action-RPGs—and none of them play better than 2005’s Kingdom Hearts II, maybe the best such game ever made about a boy in giant shoes beating shadow monsters up with a giant key. Kingdom Hearts II is goofy (sorry), over-the-top, and often a little dumb. But it’s also a pure dose of fun and emotion, improving mightily on the gameplay of the first entry in the series, and challenging players to master its surprisingly robust combat systems. And also: Mulan is there.

Among Disney animation fans, The Black Cauldron is remembered mostly as an infamous bomb, a massively expensive early foray into computer animation that saw the company move out of its kid-friendly wheelhouse and into something quite a bit darker. (It is, of course, fondly remembered by many for those exact same reasons.) Its legacy in gaming is a bit more mixed. Produced by adventure game legends Sierra Entertainment in 1986, the computer game adaptation of The Black Cauldron is mostly notable for being an early, non-horny effort from designer Al Lowe, still a year out from solidifying his smutty, funny legacy with the creation of Leisure Suit Larry. Black Cauldron instead takes Sierra’s own King’s Quest as its major inspiration, sending assistant pig-keeper Taran on various errands across the magical land of Pyrdain. Meanwhile, the game’s other major legacy was a response to the stresses of making it, rather than the game itself: As programmer Scott Murphy and artist Mark Crowe toiled to ship the thing, they struck up a friendship based on their mutual love of sci-fi, rather than fantasy. The result was the Space Quest series, which quickly became another crown jewel in Sierra’s list of wins—even as The Black Cauldron itself was mostly forgotten.

Of all the Disney-owned brands to ever get a video game adaptation, few are as obviously ill-suited to the job as ABC’s sitcom hit Home Improvement, a TV show in which a virtuous man in flannel endlessly tried to stop his boss from killing himself with power tools, cryptic advice from a man who lives behind a magical fence … and family. Power Tools Pursuit!, improbably co-designed by Boy And His Blob legend David Crane, dispenses with all that nonsense in favor of a whole other brand of nonsense: Sending Tim Allen through “TV sets” in pursuit of his stolen tools, a fairly transparent ploy to allow The Tool Man to battle mummies and dinosaurs instead of his own endlessly self-destructive urges. (Hilariously, the game appears to have tried to capture the Tool Time vibe by deliberately shipping without any real guide for starting players; the “manual” instead contained a sticker that loudly informed players “Real men don’t need instructions!”)

A good reminder that “weird” and “bad” aren’t necessarily synonymous, this 1995 platformer is here mostly to stand in for an odd little sub-genre of games that also encompasses 1991 Genesis title QuackShot: Games that re-imagine Donald Duck as an actor “starring” in various genre-based video games, the same way he might be, say, an archeologist or a detective in certain cartoons. Of the two, though, Maui Mallard is by far the strangest. (To the point that the North American version never even mentions Donald Duck, even though it, clearly stars Donald Duck.) Instead, you play as detective Maui Mallard, who is also able, for not entirely clear reasons, to transform himself into a ninja named Cold Shadow, with each character having unique move-sets to get themselves through the game’s levels. Maui Mallard actually plays pretty well, but it’s also a clear example of the strange human impulse—also embodied in the Italian comics industry’s bizarre Papernik series of sci-fi/spy adventures (which have also gotten their own games, of course)—to make Donald Duck seem cool, for some inexplicable reason.

Okay, so, remember that bit back in the “Best” section where we talked about how Kingdom Hearts can actually be pretty great if you wipe away all the extraneous cruft? Here’s the part where it turns out to be cruft nearly all the way down, as exemplified by the following exercise: Let’s try to type out, from memory, the plot of 2010 handheld Kingdom Hearts spin-off Re:Coded (itself a re-release of a Japanese mobile game just called Coded) in as concise a manner as possible. Here goes!

Shortly after Kingdom Hearts II, Sora, Donald, and Goofy are sucked into a cyber version of Jiminy Cricket’s magical journal via the Tron laser so that they can battle digital Heartless in electro-recreations of old Disney movies. In the end, they manage to uncover the secret that Sora has, like, a whole town’s worth of people “living” in his heart who need to be released—the Data Sora tells Mickey Mouse, who relays it to the real Sora via a message in a bottle from the end of Kingdom Hearts II. Then it takes another nine years for Kingdom Hearts III to actually come out.

We definitely fudged a detail or two, there, but this? This is what people are talking about when they make fun of Kingdom Hearts.

Welcome, friends, to what is probably the single weirdest sub-genre of Disney games: Those that don’t try to adapt any one particular movie or TV show, but the Disney parks themselves, a true digital oasis for the incurable Disney Adult. Capcom’s Adventures In The Magic Kingdom was a pretty straightforward collection of NES-set mini-games, tasking you with playing through fairly shoddy recreations of Space Mountain, The Haunted Mansion, and more, while playing as a small Disney-obsessed child with a very large hat. (You also had to answer Disney trivia questions like “What is Mickey’s dog’s name?”) Disneyland Adventures, meanwhile, is a fairly robust recreation of the park itself, albeit one where all the rides have been stripped out in favor of awful and repetitive mini-games. (It used to be a title for Microsoft’s motion-sensing Kinect, natch.)

But the strangest of them all might be Virtual Magic Kingdom, which ran online from 2005 to 2008, and was, essentially, a hybrid between a more traditional massively-multiplayer online game and a glorified (if also highly censored) chat room. Played from an isometric top-down perspective, the game tasked its young players with collecting various pins and badges hidden around its recreations of the parks—the better to show off all the pins and badges they’d found while running around its recreations of the parks. Reading about it now imparts an undeniable anthropological vibe to the distant viewer; there were deep cultures that developed and festered here, as kids came of age in an online world. It’s gone, now, shuttered, one of those relics of the first age of online gaming. But its transcendently weird legacy lives on.