Barney’s Hide & Seek Game is a 1993 edutainment platforming video game developed by Realtime Associates and published by SEGA for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis entertainment system.

This game was released exclusively in the North and South American markets. It was based on the children’s television series Barney & Friends. Educational concepts taught in the game include counting, matching, and problem solving. There is a self-play feature that guides the player to the objective without input from the player.

The voice of Barney was recorded by his original voice actor Bob West, who also did it on the television show. There are more than one hundred words and two hundred phrases spoken by Barney the Dinosaur. 

In this game, the objective is to move Barney around four themed levels and locate four children along with Baby Bop and five presents that are hiding throughout the level. Should the player find all the children including Baby Bop and presents in different levels, they would be rewarded with a “special surprise”. During the surprise, the purple balloon pop and confetti and streamers fall from above onto excited children, as well as Barney and Baby Bop. Players are unable to lose in the game, even if they did not retrieve all the objects and find all the missing children in the level.

When standing nowhere near an object to interact with, Barney can blow kisses in the air complete with flying heart symbols. Locating a child results in giving him or her a hug. Barney can fly on balloons, float on clouds, and jump on nearby platforms. The inability for Barney to die is indicated by his refusal to fall off floating platforms; instead there is a safety lecture handed out by Barney so kids can learn to be careful like him. Cloud jumping is only possible when the traffic light is showing a green signal.

Favourite things are always mentioned by name by Barney when the player helps him discover them. Most of the lines for the game were recorded with the nouns and verbs being fractured, resulting in one-second pauses between non-crucial words and words crucial to gameplay.

 

About This Patch: This simple patch makes the game playable in all regions and on any Mega Drive/Genesis console with any refresh rate used. It can now be played on a Japanese NTSC 60Hz Mega Drive and also a PAL Mega Drive console running at 50Hz as well as still supporting it’s original release region being North America NTSC Genesis at 60Hz.

NOTES: 

I found a complete boxed version of this game second-hand many years ago for almost nothing and upon taking it home and trying it I quickly discovered that it was region-locked and wouldn’t play in my region without a mega key adapter or a game genie code to bypass the lock out. I also own a Mega EverDrive flash cartridge and have this hacked version of mine dumped onto the SD card through that device so my small kids can now play the game without any annoying lock out crap.

This game uses the G.E.M.S. sound driver

Every now and then Barney’s voice pans and some sentences are heard through one speaker only.

This game is a great way to get your little youngsters into Sega Mega Drive/Genesis gaming! My kids enjoy playing this from time to time as it’s quite simple and when they don’t know what to do and don’t push a button on the controller, the game eventually plays itself to completion so your child still feels like they did something.

INSTRUCTIONS: 

Inside the ZIP file you’ll find the IPS patch, it is in Lunar IPS format and simply needs to be patched to the original USA version of the game.