Disney's Aladdin/History

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Legacy

Disney's Aladdin for the Mega Drive is considered to be a milestone for video game graphics, utilising technology known as "Digicel" to bring hand-drawn Disney-style animations to a video game environment. As each frame was drawn individually by professional Disney animators, Aladdin looked significantly better than most other platformers on the market, with visuals comparable to the graphical style as seen in the film.

With the exception of unreleased games such as DynoBlaze, no other Mega Drive games utilised the "Digicel" technology, however Aladdin did inspire many similar methods, such as those applied in Shiny Entertainment's Earthworm Jim (comprised of many former Aladdin developers). Other games published by Virgin such as Cool Spot and Mick & Mack as the Global Gladiators share Aladdin's focus on animation, whereas many games such as Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure are considered to be inspired by Aladdin's efforts.

The success of Disney's Aladdin gave Virgin Games the opportunity to work with other Disney licenses such as The Jungle Book, The Lion King and Pinocchio. It was also bundled with Mega Drive II systems in Europe.

A Sega Mega-CD version was planned for release, though full production was unlikely to occur until after sales numbers for the Mega Drive version "became apparent". The CD version was scrapped in favour of concentrating on The Jungle Book.