Gaming memories from my youth: Jungle Hunt

If you were born after 1990 then there is a really good chance that you never saw this, or many of the other games that I commonly write about. I never owned this game and when I played it at a friend's house on his Atari it was pretty terrible. In all actuality the arcade was pretty terrible or at least it appears as such today but that is fine seeing as how it is 40 years old.

The reason why I remember this game so fondly is because I found it to be captivating but ultimately something that I could never master. It was a frustrating experience and one that after spending a few dollars on in quarters, I eventually gave up never to return to it.

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There's a fun legal story behind this game that I was unaware of until recently. The game was originally called "Jungle King" and starred a shirtless man swinging along vines trying to of course, save a woman who had been captured. They were forced by legal means to change the overall look of the game because it was very clearly a copy of the character Tarzan.

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So they put a shirt and a helmet on the guy, revamped the story a bit and released it to arcades and later home systems.

There were a mere 4 stages to this game but trust me when I say that they were a lot more complicated than you think. The first stage was one where you had to swing from vine to vine and they would move back and forth in a manner that made it very difficult to time your jumps without landing in the jungle below. I only ever made it past this stage a couple of times. Since you were racing against at timer you couldn't just sit on a vine forever waiting for the right moment as running out of time would result in a the loss of a life.

The second stage had you swimming down a river filled with crocodiles and you had to time your knife strikes ever so perfectly or they would chomp you down. This was very frustrating because the hit-box detector was so small that a slight miscalculation on a button press would result in instant death. You also had to return to the surface for air so simply going under he crocs was not an option.

I never made it to the 3rd or 4th stages but I did witness other, older gamers make it to this point.

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The 3rd stage involved running up a hill with boulders crashing down towards you. I never actually played this stage but it looked terribly difficult when I witnessed it being done by an arcade expert because your vertical jump was not at all impressive and the boulders would bounce in different patterns. If you were standing on just the right spot as they bounced, this simply wasn't possible to finish. I can only assume that the expert I watched playing this had dumped many quarters into the machine in order to figure out exactly where he needed to be standing at each point in the stage.

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The final stage was just a single room where our hero had to evade jumping cannibals who were slowly lowering the woman into a burning cauldron. This stage, at least from my perspective as an observer, seemed a lot easier than the rock jumping one prior to it and my arcade hero finished it with what appeared to be relative ease. When you get to the lady the game just writes "Congratulations, I love you" on the screen and then the whole thing started over from the start.

It hardly seems like this was worth building an entire arcade cabinet out of but in 1982/83 it was one of the top 6 selling arcade cabinets in the world.

Something that was quite special about the game is that it used side-to-side scrolling in the scenes and up to this point there weren't very many games that did this. For the most part back in the 80's the action stayed on a single screen such as games like Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Missile Command, Pengo, and many others. This might have been part of the reason why the game was so popular because from a graphical standpoint it wasn't really very impressive, even by early 80's standards.

I probably only dumped about 2-3 dollars into this machine before giving up because in my childish mind it was "too difficult." I did however really enjoy watching other people who were great at it and it seemed to be an arcade tradition at the time for more experienced players to get involved in the game so that all the other novices like myself could gather around and admire how good they were at it.

Nerds reigned supreme in the 80's and the arcade was their kingdom. Those were wonderful times for gamers and I have a lot of fun memories of blowing what little money I had as a child in precisely this manner.