TODO: Add more tricks and information, fix grammar and/or parts that are difficult to understand
The purpose of this page is to document all the known tricks of the SNES version of The Lion King.
While some things do overlap between SNES and Genesis, this resource is specific to SNES. You can check a Genesis specific page here.
Table of contents

Movement tech

Familiarize yourself with Simba's movement and optimization.

Vertical Jump

If Simba jumps standing still, he will do whats called a vertical jump. Simba does a noticiable stop for a few frames before actually jumping, because of that it is slower but goes higher and TASes will not use it unless height is strictly necessary.

Horizontal Jump

If Simba jumps while has any amount of X velocity, he will do whats called a horizontal jump. Simba does a almost unnoticeable 1 frame stop before actually jumping and preserves speed, because of that it is faster but goes lower and TASes will use this most of the times. But keep in mind that unnecessary jumps lose 1 frame.

Mid-air Speed Conservation

Normally, Simba would lose all his speed after stopping Mid Air, but if you hold L+R (or alternate between them every frame) you can keep Simba's momentum. (Normally looks like Simba is turning around super fast but if the video is recorded and/or playedback at 30FPS, Simba will look still.)



General optimization


Cutscene Skipping

How to skip cutscenes.

SNES vs Genesis

While on Genesis you can just press "Start" in order to skip cutscenes, on SNES we're not so lucky and that doesn't work.

How to skip

With our current knowledge only a single cutscene is skippable, Right after you kill the hyena the game will transition from Pridelands to Can't Wait To be King and play a cutscene in between, but if you grab the ledge there from below, the cutscene will be skipped. This happens because a lot of RAM adresses are shared in memory and just so happends that Simba's Y Velocity is shared with the trigger that finishes the cutscene, so grabbing the ledge from below gets just the right value to skip it. Technically you don't need to ledge grab but then it has no consistency.

Clipping

Depending if you are Cub Simba or Adult Simba you are going to clip through walls differently.

Cub Simba method

This only works on corners. If you get to a specific position with specific speed you can simply phase through them, it changes from corner to corner so there is not a fixed value that always works. For example, Exile Voldemort is subpixel perfect, whie Exile 1 is nearly free.

Adult Simba method

When using a throw attack, Simba's collision is disabled so if an enemy is close to a wall you can throw it and clip. Also, leopards are still throwable when dead so you can use that to clip too.

RNG

This section is dedicated to how the game RNG works.

Overview

The RNG is a 3 byte value in WRAM stored at $1E00-$1E02 that can be visualized using Akiteru's LUA Script.

How it works

The RNG advances every time it is called, always following the same pattern so it is very predictable but unreliable at long periods. Note that the first byte gets cleared at the start of each stage.

What is affected

A lot of things are affected by RNG but not everything matters for TASing, list of things that might be useful:

Where it can be manipulated

There is not a lot of places, hitting boulders on Destiny makes a lot of RNG rolls, enemies attacks will do a single advancement uppon the end of their attack, camera positioning on Hakuna vultures also can make extra advancements. It really depends on your case.

Be Prepared RNG

Be Prepared is the nightmare of RNG Manips of this game, if you are skipping the level by clipping, you need to manipulate the leopard and the geysers.
First, you need to get the leopard tired after a single attempt of attacking Simba, There is not really much to it outside of that and optimal movement.
The geysers are the most complex part of the level. There are 4 geysers that erupt from right to left each erupting 5 times before a platform fall and the leftmost one leads to you to the next level, Simba's Return and that should be it, but a lot of tech was found over the years.
Geyser cooldown:
The cooldown is decided between 31-41 in hexadecimal based on the current RNG Seed.
Old geyser skips:
If you do Be Prepared Skip, the camera is just thin enough to load a single geyser (the right most one on this case). If you enter the arena before the cooldown ends, the second geyser from right to left will load correctly and the eruptions will proceed normally. But if you wait until the cooldown ends, after the eruption finishes all the geysers will be loaded at the same time and the one with the shortest cooldown will erupt. So if you get a good RNG the leftmost geyser will erupt second and save 4 eruptions (compared to the default order).
New geyser skips:
You can exit the geyser arena to stop the geysers from erupting until you comeback. So if the rightmost geyser is about to erupt, you can exit the arena while the middle geysers are odd and the leftmost is even (or vice-versa, they just cant be the same), you can reenter the arena on a specific frame close to the frame when a new geyser cooldown starts. If performed correctly, the lsat erupted geyser will reerupt so that can be abused to save an additional 6 eruptions (on top of the ones saved from the old geyser skips).

No Be Prepared Skip RNG

The lava droplets are RNG so some times it will get on your way, you can avoid them by hitting hyenas and leopards as after their attack ends the RNG does a single advancement. Other than that you'll need to backtrack and manipulate on previous levels.
GameResources/SNES/TheLionKing last edited by ShgofcTAS on 3/26/2026 8:15 PM
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