Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Developed by Digital Eclipse and published by Activision in 1999, Disney's Tarzan for the Game Boy Color is an ambitious handheld adaptation of Disney's animated film. Rather than attempting to imitate the 3D-influenced PlayStation version, it becomes a traditional 2D platformer built around exploration, climbing and collecting.
Rating: 7/10
The game loosely follows Tarzan's journey from childhood to adulthood across 23 stages. Young Tarzan handles most of the early adventure, while later stages introduce Adult Tarzan, Terk and Jane. Each character has slightly different abilities, but the basic gameplay remains focused on navigating large jungle environments rather than fighting enemies.
Movement is easily one of the game's strongest elements. Tarzan can run, jump, swim, climb vines, swing across gaps and hang beneath certain platforms. The animation is unusually smooth for a Game Boy Color title, giving him a sense of agility that fits the character particularly well. Jane even uses her parasol during her sections, while other stages introduce different movement situations and hazards.
Unfortunately, the objectives rarely make equally good use of these mechanics.
Most regular stages revolve around collecting a required number of bananas before locating another character who acts as the exit. The levels are often large, vertically structured and slightly maze-like, so finding 40 or 50 bananas can initially be enjoyable as you search for alternate routes and hidden areas.
The problem appears when only a few bananas remain.
There is no map, and the game gives you little indication of where anything has been missed. This can turn the final minutes of a stage into repeated trips through areas you have already explored. Reaching the required banana total also doesn't necessarily finish the level—you still have to locate Terk, Jane or whichever character is waiting at the exit.
Combat is extremely limited. Tarzan generally cannot defeat the animals roaming the jungle, so baboons, snakes, crocodiles and similar creatures function primarily as moving obstacles. You avoid them, jump over them or work around their movement patterns. It creates a distinctive pacifist style compared with many platformers, but it also makes enemy encounters rather shallow.
There are occasional changes of pace, including chase sequences and confrontations connected to Sabor and Clayton, but banana collection remains the dominant activity for most of the adventure. As a result, the game feels longer than its individual mechanics really justify.
Presentation is where Tarzan becomes considerably more impressive. Character sprites are large, colorful and extremely well animated, while the environments make effective use of the Game Boy Color palette. Short digitized movie sequences and cinematic images are also used between parts of the adventure, an impressive technical trick for the hardware.
The audio is similarly ambitious, with percussion-heavy music, jungle ambience and digitized-style effects that give the game more atmosphere than many contemporary handheld platformers. The downside is repetition: some musical loops become tiring when you spend a long time searching a level for the last few bananas.
Progress is handled through passwords rather than a battery save, which feels somewhat cumbersome today but was hardly unusual for the period.
There are also a couple of interesting extras. Hide 'N' Seek is a pass-the-system multiplayer game where one player hides a character and another attempts to find them. Paint 'N' Print lets you assemble simple pictures using Tarzan-themed stamps and was designed to work with the Game Boy Printer. Neither mode is substantial, but they are welcome additions.
Disney's Tarzan is ultimately more impressive technically than mechanically. Digital Eclipse produced excellent animation, attractive graphics and unusually ambitious audiovisual effects for the Game Boy Color, and simply moving through the jungle can feel remarkably fluid.
But almost everything is built around the same banana-collecting formula, and the absence of a map makes later exploration more tedious than it needs to be.
It's still one of the more polished Disney games on the system and a respectable portable adaptation of the film, but underneath the impressive presentation is a fairly repetitive collect-a-thon that doesn't quite have enough variety to become one of the Game Boy Color's best platformers.
Developed by Digital Eclipse and published by Activision in 1999, Disney's Tarzan for the Game Boy Color is an ambitious handheld adaptation of Disney's animated film. Rather than attempting to imitate the 3D-influenced PlayStation version, it becomes a traditional 2D platformer built around exploration, climbing and collecting.
Rating: 7/10
The game loosely follows Tarzan's journey from childhood to adulthood across 23 stages. Young Tarzan handles most of the early adventure, while later stages introduce Adult Tarzan, Terk and Jane. Each character has slightly different abilities, but the basic gameplay remains focused on navigating large jungle environments rather than fighting enemies.
Movement is easily one of the game's strongest elements. Tarzan can run, jump, swim, climb vines, swing across gaps and hang beneath certain platforms. The animation is unusually smooth for a Game Boy Color title, giving him a sense of agility that fits the character particularly well. Jane even uses her parasol during her sections, while other stages introduce different movement situations and hazards.
Unfortunately, the objectives rarely make equally good use of these mechanics.
Most regular stages revolve around collecting a required number of bananas before locating another character who acts as the exit. The levels are often large, vertically structured and slightly maze-like, so finding 40 or 50 bananas can initially be enjoyable as you search for alternate routes and hidden areas.
The problem appears when only a few bananas remain.
There is no map, and the game gives you little indication of where anything has been missed. This can turn the final minutes of a stage into repeated trips through areas you have already explored. Reaching the required banana total also doesn't necessarily finish the level—you still have to locate Terk, Jane or whichever character is waiting at the exit.
Combat is extremely limited. Tarzan generally cannot defeat the animals roaming the jungle, so baboons, snakes, crocodiles and similar creatures function primarily as moving obstacles. You avoid them, jump over them or work around their movement patterns. It creates a distinctive pacifist style compared with many platformers, but it also makes enemy encounters rather shallow.
There are occasional changes of pace, including chase sequences and confrontations connected to Sabor and Clayton, but banana collection remains the dominant activity for most of the adventure. As a result, the game feels longer than its individual mechanics really justify.
Presentation is where Tarzan becomes considerably more impressive. Character sprites are large, colorful and extremely well animated, while the environments make effective use of the Game Boy Color palette. Short digitized movie sequences and cinematic images are also used between parts of the adventure, an impressive technical trick for the hardware.
The audio is similarly ambitious, with percussion-heavy music, jungle ambience and digitized-style effects that give the game more atmosphere than many contemporary handheld platformers. The downside is repetition: some musical loops become tiring when you spend a long time searching a level for the last few bananas.
Progress is handled through passwords rather than a battery save, which feels somewhat cumbersome today but was hardly unusual for the period.
There are also a couple of interesting extras. Hide 'N' Seek is a pass-the-system multiplayer game where one player hides a character and another attempts to find them. Paint 'N' Print lets you assemble simple pictures using Tarzan-themed stamps and was designed to work with the Game Boy Printer. Neither mode is substantial, but they are welcome additions.
Disney's Tarzan is ultimately more impressive technically than mechanically. Digital Eclipse produced excellent animation, attractive graphics and unusually ambitious audiovisual effects for the Game Boy Color, and simply moving through the jungle can feel remarkably fluid.
But almost everything is built around the same banana-collecting formula, and the absence of a map makes later exploration more tedious than it needs to be.
It's still one of the more polished Disney games on the system and a respectable portable adaptation of the film, but underneath the impressive presentation is a fairly repetitive collect-a-thon that doesn't quite have enough variety to become one of the Game Boy Color's best platformers.
