Tarzan is one of those holy grails of gaming. Coleco licensed the property and prepared to release it on their own ColecoVision console as well as the Atari 2600. Due to various reasons, the Atari 2600 version was shelved and never put into production, but a copy of the prototype has been found and released to the public. 40 years after the ColecoVision was released, Atari 2600 fans can finally play this action adventure.
I am not talking about Jungle Hunt here. Tarzan for the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision is an action adventure game. You control Tarzan and move about the forest fighting hunters and various denizens of the hidden world. Your goal is to stop the hunters from taking your ape tribe away to far away zoos in lands unknown to you.
You can climb trees, jump, swing on vines, knock out hunters, and more. This is more involved than most Atari 2600 games from this time.
The game is getting generally quite favorable response from gamers that have made their feelings about it public. I have yet to play it myself.
It is not often we get to see prototypes like this released to the public. Most are hoarded by private collectors and will probably never be seen again. That is what I am sure most thought when in 2021 the manual for Tarzan on Atari 2600 went up for auction on eBay. Then in 2022, two versions of the prototype cartridge were auctioned off.
When I learned about the sales in mid 2023, I figured, great, we will never see those again.Not so as the manual has been scanned and the ROM uploaded to the Internet.
The story of Tarzan on Atari 2600 starts much farther back though.
In the early 80’s Coleco licensed the rights to make a game based on Tarzan for their ColecoVision and one of their competitors, the Atari 2600. The ColecoVision version was released in 1984 but the Atari 2600 version hit a snag along the way.
Mostly due to cost of chips and the Atari 2600 version having many special added chips to help the Atari console do more. Couple costs with the dwindling support from consumers as the Video Game Crash was gaining speed and it is clear why Coleco dropped the Atari 2600 Tarzan game from their catalog.
I know you can get a pretty complete, as available at the time of this writing, history of the Tarzan ROM on AtariMania. They also have scans of the manual which is awesome to see.
