Aladdin (1993)

Year: 1993 · Developer/Publisher: Virgin Interactive / Disney · Platform: DOS · Theme: Grand Adventure, Oriental, Licensed

Disney’s Aladdin hit theaters in November 1992, and within a year three genuinely different video game adaptations existed across three platforms, developed by three different teams with three different ideas about what an Aladdin game should feel like. This DOS release is Virgin Interactive’s version, and it’s worth saying that plainly up front, because a lot of people who remember “the Aladdin game” from childhood are actually picturing one of the console versions instead.

Virgin also built the Sega Genesis release, directed by David Perry’s team at Virgin Games USA, which leaned into fast, physical platforming with a moveset built around momentum. Capcom, working separately on Nintendo’s behalf, built the Super Nintendo version around a different structure entirely, with its own level layouts and its own sense of pacing. This DOS port descends from Virgin’s side of that split rather than Capcom’s, and it shows in the platforming feel: Aladdin here throws apples to trip pursuing guards and somersaults rooftop to rooftop with the same kinetic energy that made the Genesis version stand out on console shelves.

The level design tracks the film’s plot beat for beat, moving from Aladdin’s life as a street urchin dodging palace guards through to Princess Jasmine’s palace and the film’s later confrontations. That fidelity to the source material is the game’s clearest strength: every stage recognizably belongs to a specific moment from the movie, rather than reusing a generic desert or dungeon aesthetic stretched across the whole runtime. For a licensed platformer built to ride a blockbuster’s release window, that level of care wasn’t guaranteed, and plenty of contemporaries phoned in exactly this part of the job.

There’s a real, specific flaw worth naming rather than glossing over: this DOS version has no save function anywhere in it. That’s not a stylistic choice so much as an inherited limitation, carried over from the console originals where save systems for a platformer of this length weren’t standard practice yet. On a console played in one sitting after school, that omission barely registered. On a PC, where players expect to walk away mid-session and come back later, it turns the whole game into a commitment: finish it in one sitting, or start over from the beginning next time. Anyone booting this up today should plan around that limitation before getting invested in a late-game boss fight only to lose power or get pulled away.

None of that undercuts how well the game translates a specific licensed property into a specific platforming feel instead of settling for a generic tie-in cash-grab. It’s a strong example of a genre, movie-licensed platformers, that produced a lot of forgettable filler during this era, and it stands out precisely because someone clearly cared about matching the source film’s rhythm rather than just slapping Aladdin’s sprite onto an existing engine.

How to run it today

The DOS release runs cleanly in DOSBox on any modern system. Mount the game directory, launch the executable, and expect standard DOS-era platformer controls with no unusual configuration required.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox) · Controls: Keyboard, period-accurate platforming controls · Setup difficulty: Low

Legal status

Unlike most entries on this site, this one has an unusually clear and still very active rights holder: Disney. The Walt Disney Company remains one of the most aggressively protective rights holders in entertainment, and a 1993 movie-licensed platformer built on one of its core animated franchises is not the kind of property that quietly falls into an ownerless gray zone the way an obscure indie release from a defunct studio might. Whether that makes any particular copy in circulation today free of legal complication isn’t something this site determines title-by-title — but there’s little doubt about who would still hold and enforce the rights if it came to that, which puts this one in a different category from most defunct-studio titles here.

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4D Prince of Persia offers a similarly movement-focused platforming feel from the same general era, minus the film license. Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse leans into similar Arabian Nights-inspired setting and tone from an RPG angle instead of a platformer. The Lion King, also published by Virgin Interactive on Disney’s behalf the following year, is the closest sibling in terms of pedigree and production circumstances.