It looks like Capcom’s DuckTales won’t be the only classic Disney game to get a re-release this summer: Sega has just uploaded a teaser video onto their YouTube page that strongly suggests that Castle of Illusion may be getting a re-release very soon.
The brief teaser gives a glimpse at the Evil Queen, the antagonist of both the original Castle of Illusion and Snow White. While the teaser doesn’t reveal the name of the game specifically, the copyright info at the end of the trailer, which reads “1990, 2013 Disney”, gives away its identity: Castle of Illusion was originally released for the Genesis/Mega Drive back in 1990. The original game was developed in-house at Sega (by the same branch of the company that would later go on to create Skies of Arcadia and Panzer Dragoon Orta,) and is still regarded as one of the best Disney-based games ever created.
If you grew up during the late 80’s/early 90’s like I did, chances are you spent a lot of time playing videogames based on Disney cartoons. While most licensed games are crap (especially back then,) the Disney games produced by Capcom and Sega were generally pretty good, so I’m really glad that DuckTales and Castle of Illusion are getting re-released. Here’s hoping that Sega follows Castle of Illusion up with a re-release of the Genesis Aladdin game, which was also pretty great.
Vinny Parisi
While I certainly agree most licensed games are terrible these days, I would STRONGLY disagree that they were especially bad back in the early 90’s. In fact, I’d say the majority of licensed games used to be quite fun. Aladdin and The Lion King come to mind as being fantastic, and of course you mentioned Duck Tales and Castle of Illusion. There were also a number of great Power Rangers games, and the Adventures of Batman and Robin is still one of the best Batman games ever made (including the Arkham series). Even the older Spider-man games, while difficult, were certainly fun; back then wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now in regards to terrible, licensed games.
Michael Lacerna
There were a lot of good licensed games back then, but for every good one, there were dozens of bad ones. It’s easy to remember just the good ones and forget about all the garbage that nobody played, but there were entire publishers — like Acclaim — that did nothing but put out bad licensed games based on movies/cartoons: Total Recall, Jaws, Friday the 13th, Home Improvement, Hudson Hawk, Bebe’s Kids, Wayne’s World, the list goes on and on… anything that could get licensed back then was, and I am not exaggerating when I say there are literally hundreds of shovelware-level licensed games for the NES, SNES, and Genesis.
Vinny Parisi
I still think the good-to-bad ratio was far better back during the NES/SNES era than it is today. There are, at best, a handful of worthwhile movie/tv games this entire generation. Back then, perhaps due to the sheer volume of catalog, there were dozens and dozens of great licensed products. Sure, Acclaim and LJN in particular were an awful development company, but that’s one bad seed. The majority of developers these days, unfortunately SEGA comes first to mind with their Marvel properties, are incredibly adept at mismanaging licensed titles. I’d relive the horrors of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde before I played Iron Man or Thor again.