Instead of creating new narratives, the developers of these games based them on stories presented in other media; early examples include Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood (1985) and The Black Cauldron (1986).

In the latter, designer Al Lowe had access to Disney's original musical score, hand-painted backgrounds, and animation cels, which allowed for more advanced graphics when compared to previous games.

[26] Disney wanted to "add to the Lion King synergy of book, products, video, theme park units and recording sales" by making an animated storybook available by the 1994 Christmas shopping season.

[32] As he recalled in the book Disney Stories: Getting to Digital, "Media Station used a number of 'proprietary strategic software technologies' that made it easier for the developer to create large animation multimedia and the user to play it back, impossible until that time".

[18] The Lion King Animated Storybook's minimum requirements include a 486SX MHz, MS-DOS 6.0, Windows 3.1, 4MB of RAM, 10MB of free disk space, a Windows-compatible mouse, a 256-colour SVGA, and an 8 or 16-bit sound and 2xCD ROM drive, all of which were top of the range at the time.

[18] Entertainment Weekly called it a "humiliating fiasco" where "thousands of frustrated parents swamp[ed] tech-support lines with woeful tales of non-functioning sound cards and video freeze-ups".

[43] Ricker asserted the event demonstrated that a piece of software must be thoroughly tested on all supported platforms and system configurations before its release, regardless of what the marketing department has scheduled or what major holidays are coming up.

[25] Marc Teren, vice president of Disney Interactive's entertainment division, hoped to create games with a "true and fair representation of the original property",[5] while aiming to capitalize on "ancillary products to successful theatrical and home video releases".

[75] Sanctuary's 35 staff in their local Victoria, British Columbia, office became a small part of Disney Interactive's 300 employees, and handled the programming, sound and graphic design, and art instead of Media Station.

[92] The success of previous titles in the series like Toy Story led to The Hercules Action Game, Animated Storybook, and Print Studio being rushed out in October to preempt the Christmas season.

[111] The Seattle Times noted that for Toy Story Animated Storybook, "Faced with home computers' modest processing power, Disney's programmers had to limit the number of objects moving onscreen".

[110] When asked in 2012 if Pixar would return to the gaming industry, Brave director Mark Andrews firmly said "no" based on his experience at the Interactive Products Group,[110] while the film's producer, Katherine Sarafian, said, "I don't think we would consider it now because we want to focus on the primary business of filmmaking".

Throughout 1997, Living Books' sales dropped while costs increased, facing growing competition from Disney Interactive and Microsoft in the animated storybook genre; as a result, its staff was laid off and the group was folded into Broderbund.

[125] Creative Capers president Sue Shakespeare noted that "in games and Animated Storybooks, there's a purpose for every scene and you have to communicate that quickly using half or even a tenth the number of the frames.

In 101 Dalmatians, to appeal to 1990s audiences, technology was updated or added, including computers, video game consoles, larger screen television sets, and passcode-enabled security gates.

Like in the film, the animated storybook video game follows Pocahontas and her friends Flit the hummingbird and Meeko the raccoon aim to prevent a war between British settlers and her Native American people.

The game follows the plot of the 1996 Disney film The Hunchback of Notre Dame closely, and features six separate activities that can be played throughout the story, which is narrated by the fictional entertainer Clopin Trouillefou.

[154] Despite sharing the same style of gameplay and the same primary developer in Media Station, the game has never been released under the Disney's Animated Storybook name, although it is generally considered to be the eighth entry in that series.

[161] Joseph E. Adney III, marketing manager at Walt Disney Computer Software, noted that in their strategy "in-store, we looked for ways to support the retailers, make things more fun and add more value to the experience we are talking about".

[179] While software company executives at the time did not see television ads as commercially viable, for the Animated Storybook series, Disney proceeded as it had strong ties with mass retailers (like Walmart and Target) and mainstream family appeal.

[94][182] In retail stores, Disney set up "elaborate POP displays featuring flashing lights and, in some cases, recorded Woody and Buzz voices activated by a motion sensor".

The strategy of building discs around big-ticket movies and well-known characters has paid off big.By February 18, 1995, Disney's Animated Storybook: The Lion King had sold 400,000 copies since its November 1994 release.

[161] The Lion King became the top selling children's title in 1994 and 1995;[184] in 1994 it was the seventh best-selling CD-ROM after Myst, Doom II, 5 ft. 10 PAK Volume 1, Star Wars: Rebel Assault, The 7th Guest, and Microsoft Encarta.

[200] In 1994, Media Station received the 1995 Michigan's Leading Edge Technologies Award for the inventions and applications that the company developed and used in The Lion King, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Hunchback, and 101 Dalmatians.

"[220] Tara Hernandez of AllGame praised the PlayStation version of Mulan for its graphics, sound, and characters; the site noted that achieving the title of Imperial Storymaker requires both "imagination and creativity" from the player.

The Times Leader gave particular praise to Toy Story, and felt it was a "major jump in entertainment and new media technology, where we get a glimpse of the magic of bringing a feature film to home computers" due to its dance, glow-in-the-dark, and virtual flashlight sequences.

[269] Entertainment Weekly praised the animation, noting "the sequences...(which so closely mirror those in the film) have an immediate, you-are-there quality", in comparison to other video game adaptions of movies which "present scenes from the original flick in a truncated, non-interactive manner that can be mildly off-putting for both kids and adults".

The Philadelphia Inquirer felt the series "illustrates the dangers of runaway cross-promotion", deeming it Disneymania at its most bland, uninteresting, mundane, stale, and wafer-thin, and accusing it of following the trend rather than setting it.

[269] On a positive note, The Post-Crescent felt the games could allow young audiences to remain in the fantasy adventure worlds long after the film credits rolled, calling it a "perfect digital playmate.

[284] Joseph Szadkowski of The Washington Times thought that the video games were a product line extension that served as an example of how Disney was "cram[ming] the movie...down the throats of unsuspecting consumers", although he said the graphics were "amazing".