This Week In Retro: Jungle King

July 1982: Welcome to the jungle, king

by Diamond Feit

As I grow older, I've come to terms with the fact that I can't possibly consume every piece of media or even understand why certain things become popular in the first place. I've aged out of the key demographic for most corporations and that's OK; I've got no shortage of old books, movies, and video games to keep me company for the rest of my days. More importantly, I don't feel the need to advertise my out-of-touchness at all times, as if proclaiming ignorance of the latest pop culture phenomenon will somehow make me cool amongst my contemporaries. If I really want to know who Billie Eilish is, I can Google her, but I simply don't need that information, thank you.

However, if I may ask a selfish question, I would love to know why the hell anyone continues to give a flying fig about Tarzan. I encountered images of a white man swinging from vines through the jungle early in my youth, and these often included an exaggerated, animal-like yell. As a kid, I thought his screaming sounded funny, but that means very little since kids can laugh at anything. Eventually someone must have told me the man's name because I certainly never read any of the books or saw the movies, yet "Tarzan" gets tossed around at any muscular dude who looks like he'd fit right in amongst apes and I managed to understand the reference.

However, once I reached adulthood and had the power and resources to start investigating all those things I grew up experiencing second-hand but never understood, I still couldn't be bothered to learn more about Tarzan. Amidst the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s, following hit after hit that put the animation titan back on top, the studio produced a feature-length animated film about the supposed king of the jungle, yet despite all my enthusiasm for watching cartoons (especially on the big screen) I passed. I had been there opening weekend for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Mulan, but Tarzan held negative appeal. To this day, all I know about that 1999 film is that Phil Collins' song stole an Academy Award from both Aimee Mann and the South Park musical.

If decades of books, films, cartoons, and non-stop references to Tarzan couldn't convince me to sit down and experience his story, why would I bother bringing him up at all in this column? Well, in an ironic twist, Taito released a very Tarzan-like arcade game 40 years ago this month that brought me closer to caring about the jungle king than any of his many authorized adaptations. Indeed, Jungle King borrowed so much from the legend of Tarzan, you might know the game better under another name: Jungle Hunt.

Even if you've somehow never heard of Tarzan, Jungle King stands out amongst its contemporaries by offering not only multiple screens of action, but multiple kinds of action. Traditional arcade games did not allow for lengthy, in-depth entertainment by design. Ideally, a player would get at most a few minutes on the machine per credit before running out of time or lives. The earliest titles didn't even include a mechanic to entice players to insert additional coins to continue; you can't buy your way to a Donkey Kong kill screen, you have to earn it. Given this fact, most arcade games limit players to just one mechanic, be it shooting laser beams, eating dots, or jumping.

The epic quest of Jungle King plays out over four distinct screens, depicting the journey of our bare-chested hero to rescue a princess from hungry natives. The game begins with his highness leaping from vine to vine, carefully timing his jumps so as not to fall to the jungle floor. Next, he dives into the sea and swims amongst deadly crocodiles; armed with a knife, he can stab any beasts who get too close, but he must also manage his remaining air and periodically surface else he suffocates. Back on dry land, he again leaps for his life, only this time he's dodging boulders as they roll or bounce their way downhill. Finally, his goal in sight, he must carefully jump over armed natives' outstretched spears to save the damsel before she takes a dip in a boiling pot. If he succeeds, the hero earns a kiss from the princess before the adventure repeats at a higher difficulty level.

Jungle King's simplicity goes a long way towards making the game memorable, even decades later. Players use the joystick and one contextual button to control the action; depending on the stage, they will either need to jump or attack, but never both. Each of the four action scenes clearly communicates its goals and hazards without any need for in-game text or complex instructions. It helps that all the dangerous elements of Jungle King read as deadly at a glance; even as a child in 1982, I understood the basic need to avoid falling, drowning, animals with sharp teeth, giant rocks, or armed men.

Speaking of self-evident, Jungle King's cribbing from Tarzan iconography contains no subtlety. The title evokes Tarzan's nickname as "the king of the jungle," and whether or not anything in the game comes directly from the source material, the character on screen and all his actions certainly appear Tarzan-like, and I say this without knowing anything in depth about him or his stories. Sealing the deal, the game brazenly uses an audio sample of Tarzan's famous yell.

Even though the character of Tarzan was 70 years old back in 1982 and creator Edgar Rice Burroughs passed away in 1950, the Burroughs estate noticed how closely Jungle King evokes the likeness of Tarzan. No online source details exactly what happened when, but within months of Jungle King's release, Taito rebranded the game as Jungle Hunt. The edits ran deeper than a new marquee and new title screen though, as the hero transformed from a strapping, fur-clad young lad with long hair to an older gentleman dressed for a safari. Tarzan's signature yell disappeared, replaced by music. The natives guarding the princess, already a dated stereotype in 1982, underwent a pigment change from brown skin to green. Even the jungle itself got a makeover, as the swinging vines in the first stage became ropes. Did Edgar Rice Burroughs invent the concept of climbing plants?

We can't know for sure if any legal action took place or if Taito merely received an angry letter, but history shows that the company overwrote Jungle King with Jungle Hunt, as all subsequent ports used the revised nomenclature and revamped hero. The Atari 2600 version, which I owned and played for hours, looks surprisingly good given the hardware limitations, even featuring parallax scrolling to give the jungle background a sense of depth. I don't know that I recognized the Jungle King/Jungle Hunt similarities at the time, as the original title didn't stay on the market long before Taito hit the reset button.

I definitely did not know until I reached adulthood that Taito released another revision in late 1982 called Pirate Pete which further edits the visuals to turn everyone into pirates—including the damsel in distress. Again, whether these changes came at the behest of the Burroughs family or Taito's own decision to choose bandanas over pith helmets, I could not say, but anyone who grabs the Taito Egret II Mini arcade cabinet will get a copy of Pirate Pete to play instead of either jungle-themed game. Likewise, Pirate Pete is the only incarnation of this particular game included in Hamster's Arcade Archives series.

Which brings us to the modern day where neither Jungle King nor Hunt retains much relevancy; Taito seems to have gone all-in on Pirate Pete for the foreseeable future. Edgar Rice Burroughs' earliest works have fallen into the public domain, but the author's estate still controls the Tarzan trademark and maintains Tarzan.com, a website that looks like I designed it in 1996. Meanwhile, the late author's Wikipedia biography includes within its lede the sentence "Burroughs was an explicit supporter of eugenics and scientific racism in both his fiction and nonfiction; Tarzan was meant to reflect these concepts," a scathing answer to the question I asked 10 paragraphs ago regarding who could possibly care about the character today.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.