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

From Kingdom Hearts to Home Improvement, we explore the finest and funkiest games in the massive Mouse House library

By William Hughes | January 28, 2023 | 4:37pm

Games Features Disney

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

Clockwise from top left: Home Improvement: Power Tools Pursuit! , Mickey Mania, Maui Mallard In Cold Shadow, Home Improvement: Power Tools Pursuit!, DuckTales, Kingdom Hearts. (Image: Square-Enix)

You can’t tell the history of video gaming without talking about Disney. Whether simply licensing its frankly overwhelming catalog of brands to other developers, or getting into games game on its own—as it has with periodic bouts of interest from the late ’80s onwards—no other company is more widely represented in the hobby; there are plenty of “actual” video game companies that have made 10, 30, even 50 times fewer games than the House Of Mouse has over its decades of meddling in the medium. Even discounting games that were simply developed by one of Disney’s subsidiaries, and launched without any connection to an existing property, there are still literally hundreds of Disney-based games out there, ranging from the old Tron game that ruled in arcades back in 1982, all the way up to releases on modern consoles today.

Many of these games were, of course forgettable; that’s just the law of averages at play. But some of them have been exceptional—genuinely great games that made the most of a beloved brand. And some of them, to put none too fine a point on it, have been weird: Oddball experiments that tapped into that obsessive gene that turns otherwise normal people into secret Disney maniacs. And so, in honor of the company’s nigh-overwhelming contribution to and/or control of the industry: A look back at five of the best, and five of the weirdest, Disney titles in the gaming canon.

As Disney celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, The A.V. Club marks the occasion with a series of lists, essays, and more.

The Best: Tron (Arcades, 1982)

Arcade Game: Tron (1982 Midway/Walt Disney Co.)

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 . 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 Best: DuckTales (NES, 1989)

NES Longplay [064] Duck Tales

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 . 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 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.)

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The Best: The Mickey “Illusion” Games (Sega Genesis and Game Gear, 1990–1993)

Mega Drive Longplay [047] Castle of Illusion

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.)

The Best: Aladdin/The Lion King (Super Nintendo/Genesis, 1993 & 1994)

SNES Longplay [015] Aladdin

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 , 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.)

The Best: Kingdom Hearts II (PlayStation 2, 2005)

Kingdom Hearts HD 2 5 ReMIX | E3 2014 Trailer

You can’t really talk about Disney and gaming without talking about . 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.

The Weirdest: The Black Cauldron (PC, 1986)

The Black Cauldron (PC/DOS) 1986, Longplay, Sierra on-line

Among Disney animation fans, 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.

The Weirdest: Home Improvement: Power Tools Pursuit! (Super Nintendo, 1994)

Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit! (SNES) Playthrough

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 , 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!”)

The Weirdest: Maui Mallard In Cold Shadow (Super Nintendo, PC, Genesis, 1995)

[Longplay] SNES - Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow [100%] (4K, 60FPS)

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.

The Weirdest: Kingdom Hearts Re:coded (Nintendo DS, 2010)

KINGDOM HEARTS Re:coded | Opening Movie

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.