Disney have been in and out of the software business, either running a dedicated software label themselves or licensing out its famous characters to other companies to produce games based on them.
Back in the mid 1980s there was a series of official Disney games with an educational nature, published in the UK and Europe by U.S. Gold. This included Donald Duck’s Playground, Mickey’s Runaway Zoo and Winnie the Pooh in Hundred-Acre Wood.
However, a magazine news article promised more titles. The first of these was based on The Black Cauldron, itself based on the children’s fantasy novels of Lloyd Alexander. (It was the first Disney animation to feature computer-generated images). Another game based on Return to Oz, released the same year, was released.
However it is not known what happened to The Black Cauldron – at least on the Commodore 64. The game did see release on the likes of DOS and the Commodore Amiga, which shows Sierra as having a link with the game. It seems that the King’s Quest engine was re-used – an engine which never saw a C64 port anyway.
GTW’s Fabrizio suggested that Al Lowe may know more, and after some quick questioning, Al had the following to say:
“Since Sierra never made an AGI engine that could fit on the C64, I doubt there were firm plans. But, on occasion they hired another company to just start from scratch and create whatever they could, using our games as the basis. (I know there was a King’s Quest game done for the Nintendo like that. There may have been a version for the C64, too.)”
So no developments there… and it feels like this could well be a vapourware title as a result. We’ll continue to post any updates if we learn anything more.
Contributions: Fabrizio Bartoloni, Cavery210, Al Lowe
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The Black Cauldron was released on DOS, Amiga and the other American computers of the day. It was probably a port of Sierra’s adventure game, which was innovative for its use of function keys that performed various actions instead of the usual Sierra text parser seen in King’s Quest and Space Quest.
Thanks Cavery210 – i’ll make a note on the page with credit to yourself. I think this was a really old write up that was done years ago, so i’ll tidy it up whilst i’m here :)