The Lion King is a side-scrolling platformer where players control the protagonist, Simba, in the events of the film, going through both child and adult forms as the game progresses.

Simba starts the game with a certain number of lives, depending on the difficulty setting, which are lost if he runs out of health, falls into a bottomless pit, or a lake of water or lava, or is hit by a rolling boulder.

By finding certain bugs hidden in specific levels, the player enters bonus stages as Timon and Pumbaa to earn extra lives and continues.

Game designer Louis Castle revealed that two levels, Hakuna Matata and Be Prepared, were adapted from scenes which were cut from the final movie.

[11] An Amiga 1200 version was developed with assembly language in two months by Dave Semmons, who was willing to take on the conversion if he received the Genesis source code.

He had assumed the game to be programmed in 68000 assembly, and the Amiga and Genesis share the same Motorola CPU family, but he found it had been written in C, a language he was unfamiliar with.

[29] GamePro reviewed the SNES version, commenting on outstanding graphics and voices, but "repetitive, tedious gameplay that's too daunting for beginning players and too annoying for experienced ones".

They particularly noted the imprecise controls and highly uneven difficulty, though they said the "movie-quality graphics, animations, and sounds" were good enough to make the game worth playing regardless of the gameplay.

When the grown-up Simba gives a blood-curdling roar and mauls snarling hyenas, the interaction is so well observed that it's like watching a PBS nature documentary.

The sense of power it gives you is exhilarating, and by the time Simba takes his climactic heavyweight stand against his evil uncle Scar, this Lion King has turned into a wild-kingdom variant of Street Fighter II".