Disney's Aladdin

In Disney's Aladdin, you throw apples at guards whose trousers drop to their ankles, bounce off striped market awnings, and dodge flying knives across Agrabah.

Stepping onto the Agrabah rooftops

The moment you launch the 1994 release of Disney's Aladdin on MS-DOS, you notice how expressive the movement looks. Virgin Interactive Entertainment used a process called Digicel to shrink traditional hand-drawn Disney animation onto PC sprite sheets. When Aladdin swings a scimitar or crouches low, he moves like a film character rather than a stiff collection of pixels. That visual polish pulls you into the Market level immediately.

You start with a handful of apples and a sword. Guards attack from both sides, desert snakes snap at your shins, and knives rain down from upper windows. You can slash close enemies or hurl apples to stun them from across the screen. The apples run out fast, so you spend half your time hunting for refills buried inside clay pots or perched on high ledges.

How the platforming actually plays in practice

Despite the smooth visual flair, the underlying controls feel stiff. A common complaint among PC players is input latency. You have to wait for an animation to wrap up before your next button press registers. If you try to jump immediately after landing a sword strike, Aladdin stands still for a fraction of a second, which often leads to taking avoidable damage.

The level design splits across ten distinct stages, taking you from Agrabah Market up through the Sultan's Palace and into Jafar's lair. The early stages rely on simple jumping and rope climbing, but later levels introduce severe difficulty spikes. You hit blind trust jumps where you must drop off a ledge into the void, hoping a floating platform catches you below. If you want to check out other fast-paced titles from the same era, browse our collection of action games.

• Agrabah Market, The Desert, and Agrabah Rooftops for early urban platforming.
• Sultan's Dungeon and Cave of Wonders for tight hazards and falling obstacles.
• The Escape and Rug Ride for high-speed survival challenges.
• Inside the Lamp, Sultan's Palace, and Jafar's Palace for the final gauntlet.

Secrets, cheats, and MS-DOS quirks

Between levels, collected Genie and Abu tokens open up bonus rounds. The Genie mini-game is a simple wheel of fortune where you spin for extra lives or extra apples. The Abu stage turns into a frantic mini-game where you control the monkey, catching bonus items dropped from above while dodging rocks and heavy clay pots.

The developer left plenty of neat secrets in the levels. In The Desert stage, you can spot a clothesline displaying Mickey Mouse ears. Standing next to it makes the ears pop onto Aladdin's head for a free extra life. Nearby, a pillar carved with Goofy's face marks the location of a hidden shop tucked high out of reach. If the late-game difficulty gets too frustrating, pressing F10 or Z lets you trigger built-in cheats to skip levels or fly freely through walls.

The PC version carries a few odd conversion bugs. While the title screen plays a vocal rendition of "A Whole New World," the in-game music driver occasionally glitches out. Songs can play out of order, or background tracks might fail to stop during stage transitions. If you enjoy titles from this studio, explore more releases by Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Inc. on the site.

Is Disney's Aladdin worth playing today?

The MS-DOS edition remains an interesting piece of 16-bit era computer gaming. While the jump timing can be unforgiving and the animations occasionally delay your inputs, the art design and detailed animation still look fantastic. It captures the look of the film far better than most movie tie-ins from the 1990s managed.

You can play Disney's Aladdin online, free in your browser right here. There is nothing to install and no setup needed. Grab a keyboard, save your apples for the heavy guards, and see if you can make it past the lava in the Cave of Wonders on your first attempt.