Disney's Aladdin/Development

Back to: Disney's Aladdin.

A Virgin Games USA developer overviews some of the game's character animation cycles.

The development of Disney's Aladdin was a monumental undertaking for both Disney Software and Virgin Games USA. Incorporating hand-drawn Digicel artwork, and working closely with the original film's animators, the successful reception of the game's late 1993 release set a new bar for licensed blockbuster video game tie-ins, and would solidify Aladdin's place as one of the Mega Drive's best-selling and most well-remembered titles.

Development

“	Powered by what eventually became known as “Digicel” technology, along with a solid selection of middleware and some impressive talent, Aladdin managed to set itself apart from other Genesis titles of the era. Aladdin’s beautifully hand-crafted, surprisingly well-quantized artwork set new expectations for many in the realm of what could be accomplished on Genesis hardware. It did so not by leveraging any particularly fancy raster effects or obscure hardware techniques, but rather by pairing effective artwork and design with just the right technology.	„
— Rich Whitehouse^[1]

Wanting to make a more meaningful contribution to the video game market (as opposed to just licensing out properties as had been the case until now), Disney Software were approached by Virgin Games with work-in-progress technology known as "Digicel" - a means of converting frame-by-frame animation cells (used in producing animated films) to a format more suited to video game consoles at the time^[2]. As Digicel theoretically allowed Disney to bring its trademark standards of animation to a new market, the company signed up to working in conjunction with Virgin Games on a new product - the Mega Drive version of Aladdin.

Work began in January 1993 (having temporarily shelved The Jungle Book, which was in mid-production^[3]), with ten of Disney's Florida-based animators producing animations, which were then shipped to Virgin Games' production facility in Irvine, California and digitised for use in-game^[4]. Roughly thirty people were involved between the two sites in total^[4], including the film's directors^[5]. The teams gave themselves a deadline of October 1993 (or "100 days"^[6]), considered roughly three quarters of the normal time allotted to game development in this era^[4].

Lead programmer David Perry claims to have been insured for $1.5 million over the 100 day period, being medically assessed on the first day of the project, and working (on average) 19 hour days^[6].

A Disney Interactive graphic artist producing the game's intricate line art.

Disney worked exclusively on character animations (which took nearly eight weeks to produce^[7]), with backgrounds being provided by artists at Virgin Games (after being approved)^[4]. Despite being in production at the same time, no animations are shared between the game and movie, mostly due to the requirement for video game animations to loop^[4]. 1,500 new pieces of art were created for the game, with 250,000 digitised cells from the film also at the team's disposal for reference^[8]. The team did not have access to the full movie, with Virgin instead paying the development team's cinema tickets^[6].

During production, the game's development team met with the Sega Girls Task Force, a group of Sega of America executives who worked with first and third-party developers to advise on issues of female inclusion and accessibility. While the group had encountered significant pushback from most other developers, Task Force member Pamela Kelly was pleasantly surprised to find that David Perry was happy to work with the group - the end result being both a slight reduction in the final version's difficulty and a greater emphasis on more "accessible" lighthearted elements and humor. In spite of Perry's positive reception, Kelly recalls that Disney's producers were much colder, again providing resistance and attitude to the Task Force's efforts.^[9]

The Mega Drive Aladdin was meant to launch in the US on the same day as the VHS release - October 10, 1993^[8], however other sources suggest it missed this date^[10]. Sega of America allocated a $3-$4 million advertising budget for the game^[8], with advertising inserts being included (alongside Colgate and Pizza Hut offers) with the original VHS^[11].

Aladdin was first shown to the public at Summer CES 1993, with a lavish production number of the song, "Prince Ali", complete with harem girls and a fire eater^[8]. At the event, Tom Kalinske gave a speech, as did Virgin Games chairman Richard Branson, Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katenberg and Virgin Games president Martin Alper^[8]. The version on display was incomplete, though was said have passed 14 out of 20 milestones^[8].

While the Sega-Virgin-Disney partnership garnered much of the attention at the time, this was not the only Aladdin video game project in development. Capcom, which at the time held the rights to produce Disney games for Nintendo platforms, were working on a different Aladdin game for the Super NES. Aside from working with the same source material, there is not thought to have been any overlap between the two projects - SNES Aladdin, a more traditionally made 2D platformer, launched later in 1993 to modest success. 8-bit Sega versions for the Sega Master System and Sega Game Gear developed by Nexa and SIMS, respectively, would also debut in the coming months.

Incidentally it is said that Capcom's Aladdin team drastically improved the graphics of its SNES version after seeing the Mega Drive at Summer CES^[6].