The Game: You are the king of the jungle! Swinging from vine to vine! Swimming through crocodile-infested waters! Jumping and ducking huge rolling boulders! And vanquishing spear-weilding natives to rescue the damsel! (Taito, 1982)
Memories: Not that Jungle King was an incredibly simple game – the above description is supposed to be a little bit humorous, if oversimplified – but Jungle King‘s most infamous footnote in video game history is the lawsuit that it drew. The original Jungle King game opened with the sound of a sampled “Tarzan yell” – and the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs was not amused.
Taito very quickly lost a copyright infringement lawsuit and pulled Jungle King from production, removing the sound sample and replacing the player’s character – who looked a little more like Mowgli from The Jungle Book than Tarzan – with a pith-helmeted, safari-suited explorer. The game reappeared as Jungle Hunt and otherwise remained unchanged.
A pretty decent Atari 2600 adaptation of Jungle Hunt was released, along with a decent version for the Atari 5200. All of the home versions of the game arrived well after the lawsuit forced Taito to retitle the game.
