The Lion King is a video game inspired by the movie of the same name. It was published by Virgin Super Nintendo/Super Famicom, NES, Game Boy, PC DOS, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Amiga, Master System and Game Gear. It followed Simba's journey from carefree puppy to responsible adult who must battle his scheming Uncle Scar.

It is a side-scrolling platformer, in which the controlled character must jump, climb, run and descend from platform to platform. There is one exception during the level The Stampede, in which Simba runs towards the camera (or, in the NES and Game Boy versions, runs with the camera looking down above him) dodging wildebeests and jumping over rocks.

In most versions of the game, two bars appear on the HUD. On the left is the roar meter, which must be fully charged for Simba's roar to be effective. On the right is the health bar, which decreases when Simba is injured. At the bottom left of the screen is a counter showing how many lives Simba has left. You can regain health by collecting bugs of different shapes and sizes. There are also some rare bugs that damage health.

The player controls Simba (first as a cub and then as an adult) in the main levels and Timon or Pumbaa in the bonus levels.

The sound and graphic quality of the game varied greatly due to the different capabilities of the consoles. In the MS-DOS version, the sound quality varied greatly depending on the sound hardware present on the PC and how the game was configured, as the MS-DOS version required selecting the installed sound card from a list via a separate utility included with the game, and required technical knowledge of the card's IRQ and DMA settings. The game was compatible with most of the popular sound cards available on the market at the time of its release, including Ad-Lib music, Disney Sound Source, Gravis Ultrasound and SoundBlaster 16. However, it still did not work properly on certain SoundBlaster clones, especially if the clone used non-standard IRQ or DMA settings. The SNES and Genesis versions are similar, although the Genesis version has more grainy sprites and backgrounds, and the SNES version is a bit slower than the Genesis version.

The Amiga version omitted the I Can't Wait to Be King level, bonus levels, and cutscenes, presumably to save disk space, since it was presented on floppy disks. The music for some levels was also remixed slightly differently. However, the MS-DOS version was also distributed on 3 floppy diskettes, but included the missing levels and had exactly the same music as the Super Nintendo version on compatible hardware.

The NES version omitted even more content, with only Simba's levels and the removal of the brief Death Tag music piece that plays when Simba dies. Instead, the level music continues. The levels were also shortened considerably.

The Windows 3.1 version was based on the WinG graphics engine, but a number of Compaq Presarios were not tested with WinG, causing the game to crash when loading. This led Microsoft to create the more stable DirectX engine, used to this day.

On August 27, 2019, it was announced that the video game would receive a remastered version. The remastered game will be released on October 29, 2019.