Tarzan (1984)

 

Last post I made an aside about the lack of games based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's stories, so I figured it would be good to have a look at one of the very few, Tarzan, produced for the Colecovision. (I'm not counting the several games based on the animated Disney movie, as that version is more Disney than Burroughs.)

Tarzan isn't what most people would describe as sword and sorcery, but as one of Robert E. Howard's favorite authors, ERB's action-packed stories provided a major foundation for the genre. I've noticed over the years that while Howard fans generally enjoy ERB's work, the feeling isn't always mutual as ERB purists sometimes scoff at the lack of romance in the work of Howard and writers that followed him. Anyway, on to the game!

As the manual states, "Cruel hunters and the Beastmen of Opar have abducted Tarzan's tribe of Great Apes and imprisoned them in cages throughout the jungle. It's up to you to save the apes from being shipped out of their jungle home to zoos." I've noticed a lot of modern takes on Tarzan tend to fixate on conservation/ecological themes, as if Tarzan was like a politically incorrect forerunner of Captain Planet. But to the game's credit, at least we do get something involving the city of Opar, and the manual identifies many of the supporting characters in the game by the names Burroughs gave them: Nkima the chimp, Bolgani the gorilla, Histah the snake, and Gimla the crocodile.

The game plays like a Pitfall-inspired platformer. Tarzan must run from one end of the jungle to Opar, freeing apes from cages along the way. You also rescue Nkima, who's supposed to follow you and alert you to dangers such as pit traps, but Nkima will leave you if you pass too close to bananas and his warnings are often useless anyway. Bolganis will rush you and hunters will try to shoot you, but you can either punch them out or avoid them by taking to the trees and swinging through the canopy. Histah will hide in the bushes and leap out at you if you come too close, and Gimla will attack you if you take to the water. Despite the technological limitations, the game does an effective job at presenting Tarzan's toughness, speed, and mobility. 

Approaching Opar, Tarzan will start encountering the beastmen (no La in the game, unfortunately), and when you arrive the temple, you have to scale the levels of the temple and free the last of the apes while beastmen harass you on the levels and the temple idol at the top shoots flames down at you. After managing the climb to the top, you have to push one of the Colecovision's keypad buttons to have Tarzan make the victory cry of the bull-ape, which causes the idol to fall, and then the game restarts at a higher difficulty.

It's a standout game for the system, but unfortunately it didn't release until 1984, i.e., post-video game crash when game distribution was collapsing, so it's fallen into obscurity. As of the present, it doesn't even appear to have an entry on Mobygames.com. The controls can be a little bit fiddly but nothing that can't be gotten used to, and it plays fast and has nice graphics and music. 

Supplemental reading: The Return of Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1913)