GTA 5 Meets The Lion King

Ah, the GTA V modding scene. While our coverage of it may have lessened recently, it hasn't gotten any less spectacular over the months. Enthusiastic fans continue to create all manner of mods to change up the tried and true gameplay of the single player campaign.

Modding has gained an unearned bad reputation due to the term often — and mistakenly — being used to refer to hacking, i.e. the alteration of GTA Online with third-party tampering to one's own benefit in order to gain an unfair advantage. This behavior is in collision with the game's terms of use and will warrant a ban (something you really don't want anymore).

While hacking is common on the old-gen consoles and was formerly very common on PC, modding — actual modding — is a PC-only affair, and one of the main advantages of the platform over consoles (beyond hardware, visuals, versatility, and so on).

Mods range from the minor to major, from the serious to the silly, and this particular creation falls squarely in the silly category. Sure, people have added different character models to GTA V before, but this is the first time that the merry cast of Disney's The Lion King has graced the virtual world of Los Santos.

The mod admittedly doesn't do much, but it's more about what you do with it. All this pack does is add a handful of characters from the beloved animation film to the game, allowing you to change the model of the player character and play as these animals.

The full roster includes Timon, Pumbaa, Kiara, Nala, Mufasa, Scar, Rafiki, the three hyenas Ed, Banzai and Shenzi as well as the protagonist Simba in both cub and adult forms. The models are fully rigged so the animations are spotless, and the models themselves are of a truly high quality, though there is a reason for this.

Unfortunately, the high quality of the 3D models might also spell the end of the mod, so grab it while you can. They were ripped directly from the game Kingdom Hearts 2, and even with credit given, Disney's lawyer might start harrowing the poor author, MrMarco1003 any day now.

The mod makes use of a pre-existing script written up to help players, but mostly other modders, to switch out character models in the game. The script, called AddonPeds comes courtesy of fellow modder Meth0d, whose name is pretty well known in GTA V modding circles.

Another, more simple method is to simply rename any of the mod files to the same name as the official file for a given PED has, and replace it. The game will simply call that file the next time you load it up, but remember to make backups of everything when tampering with GTA V's game files, lest you want to download all of it again.

The mod does have some drawbacks, though. Since the range of wildlife available in GTA V is a tad limited, three of the models (Adult Simba, Mufasa and Scar, respectively) are all assigned to the deer PED, meaning they cannot be used concurrently. There go your dream of recreating the final fight between Simba and Scar in GTA V. Or the 'long live the king' scene. Or pretty much every memorable moment from the film.

Oh well.

With The Lion King still being considered to be one of the best animated films of all time, it's no surprise this mod got real popular real fast. Beyond all the praise thrown at the author in the comments section on GTA5-Mods, a number of fan videos were already made using the mod.

As to be expected, Timon is one of the most popular characters from the mod, and going all gangster with him and his buddy Pumbaa is years of typical The Lion King parodies come to life. I mean, come on, this mod gives Timon a gun in GTA V. What's not to love?