Hi. I was the Lead Artist on this and did some level design. I would like to apologize for the 'Can't Wait to Be King' level. I actually didn't do any work on that level, but it has quite the history. The monkey puzzles started out a lot harder and were made simpler. But then there was talk of making it so you couldn't die on that level. Making it a just for fun, puzzle level and I thought that was a stupid idea and campaigned heavily against it. In retrospect I was wrong, that would have been more fun. Also, we never could figure out why, on that level only, sometimes you wouldn't make jumps it looked like you should have. The programmers went to extraordinary lengths to figure it out and even made the mechanism that detected if you caught the edge much more robust, but still messes up.
If you don't know the code to get to the cheat menu are the names of the two lead programmers. Barry did the SNES version so go to the options menu and type B A R R Y. For the Sega Genesis the lead programmer was Rob, but being from the UK he hated the way us yanks pronounced his name. He claimed we made it sound more like RAAB, which is the cheat code R A A B.
Although I did work on just about everything, the stuff that I primary created were all the the titles, menus and UI, Pride Lands, Elephant Graveyard, Simba's Exile and the Pride Rock.
Trivia: James Earl Jones returned to record the line... wait no that's not right. I was gonna say that he re-recorded the line "Everything the light touches is our kingdom" to "your kingdom" as we had moved that bit to after Mufasa had died. But I just watched a play thru video and it comes right after Pride Lands and is "our kingdom." Was it another line we change? I know there was something because it was a big deal that James Earl Jones, the most expensive voice actor in Hollywood at the time, came back and did it for free.
Okay, here is another one. The Bug Toss bonus game (Yes, a Kaboom clone. We were all old school gamers.) We only had 6 months to do the game to make it out in time for the movie's release. This meant starting before the contract was officially signed as it had to go back and forth to lawyers and such and the process takes quite awhile. Disney really wasn't supposed to give us anything until the contract was done, but everybody realized that we had to start ASAP so they did what they could. We got a cassette tape of music that included some other things that were pretty cool such as the Electric Street Parade music (which was available anywhere back then, but you can get now) and early Aladdin music before they completely changed the story. It was Aladdin and his brothers and lots of stuff about high Adventure. Anyway, they also gave us composite cards with stills from the movie. One of them was the background we used for the Bug Toss game. If you watch the movie you'll notice that it is actually the root that Pumba gets stuck under when Nala is chasing him. Disney was worried that people would notice this and it would be confusing. We explained that nobody would care.
Thanks: 
