Disney, impressed with Al Lowe‘s educational adventure Troll’s Tale, from 1983, invited him to design an intuitive kids adventure game based on its 1985 movie The Black Cauldron.
Artist Mark Crowe, who later would come to work with Lowe on his first Leisure Suit Larry title, created the beautiful and stylish graphics. The Black Cauldron was released in 1986 and became the last title in the joint venture between Disney and Sierra. Following the departure, The Walt Disney Company, in 1988, incorporated Walt Disney Computer Software, Inc. as a subsidiary. Primarily to have third-party developers designing games based on the company’s existing portfolio.
To make the game more accessible for kids and a-like the classic text parser was removed and instead used the function keys to perform various actions.

Along with The Dark Crystal, The Black Cauldron remains one of the only adventure games by Sierra to be based on a movie license.