Disney’s The Jungle Book is a series of platform video games based on the 1967 Disney animated film of the same name. The game was released by Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1994 for the Game Boy, Nintendo Entertainment System, Master System, Genesis/Mega Drive, Game Gear, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and MS-DOS.

While gameplay is the same on all versions, technological differences between the systems forced changes – in some case drastic – in level design, resulting in six fairly different versions of the ‘same’ game. This article is largely based upon the Genesis version.

Plot – Jungle Book

The player controls Mowgli, a young boy who has been raised by wolves. Mowgli must leave his home in the jungle and go back to the human village because Shere Khan, a tiger, is now hunting him. Mowgli must fight jungle wildlife and ultimately Shere Khan himself to reach his village. During the journey, he meets Bagheera, Baloo, King Louie, and the hypnotist snake Kaa as well as the evil Shere Khan.

Gameplay – Jungle Book

The player controls a young Mowgli through various side-scrolling levels in a similar mold of Pitfall!. The Mowgli character must shoot or avoid enemies and navigate platformed levels and enemies by running, jumping, climbing vines and using the various weapons and powerups available during the game. Mowgli starts the game with a banana projectile, but may collect invincibility masks, coconuts, double banana shots, and boomerang bananas during the game.

Levels are completed by collecting a sufficient number of gems, then finding a specific character placed in the level, with a boss character being encountered every other level. The player scores points by obtaining gems along with having fruits and other items that contribute to the player’s in-game score.

Stages are divided into chapters which, sequentially, comprise the plot. Each chapter opens with a description of the story at that point and the objective of the stage; some stages are completed by defeating a boss, while others have ‘friendly’ characters which the player is required to find after collecting sufficient gems.

The player has six minutes to complete each level. Depending on difficulty, the number of gems the player must collect to progress is either eight (easy), ten (medium), or twelve (hard), of a total of fifteen gems spread throughout the level.

Development – Jungle Book

Development of the Genesis/Mega Drive version started in 1993 at Virgin Games USA and with programming duties taken by David Perry, but the game, which was intended to be released within that year along with the Master System version, wasn’t finished at time because of David Perry and most of the team moving away to form Shiny Entertainment.

The Genesis version was subsequently finished by Eurocom in 1994, keeping in the game most of the substantial work already done by Virgin Games USA. The levels were designed and put together using the application “The Universal Map Editor”.^[2]

Bear Necessities

Jungle Tek

Scary

Boss Tune

Tick