Jambo! Safari is an arcade game by SEGA released in 1999. The game is especially unique as an arcade title since it involves catching and tagging animals by grabbing them with a lasso, ingeniously employing the cabinet’s built-in stick shift for the job; shifting forward tosses the rope, and shifting back pulls it (and the lassoed animal) in. It’s a surprisingly addicting game, but tragically unknown and underrated.
The game has four stages, the last of which has the player tasked with pacifying one of three possible rare and/or prehistoric animals. Most kids who played this physically in arcades could only see either the Saber-toothed Tiger or White Lion, but the Beginner’s Mode attract cutscene seemed to indicate the existence of a third boss: a giant prehistoric bird obscured in shadow (which many online (including TV Tropes) have mistakenly identified as a Moa. It’s not, although it belongs to the same family. It’s a Phororharcos, colloquially known as the “Terror Bird”.)
Many kids who played this game were driven mad with speculation since the Saber-toothed Tiger and White Lion were both relatively easy to achieve (reaching the final boss with and WITHOUT using another credit, respectively), but no one had any clue what sort of ridiculous criteria was responsible for making this boss so elusive.
“You have to catch FIVE of each animal in all stages and they ALL have to be leaders and you MUST do every side quest but FAIL the poacher quest and don’t forget to get all the “no data” animals and spin around twice behind the arch this is VERY VERY important” - that kid
“Is it even in the game at all? Maybe it was dummied out and they forgot to remove it from the teaser?” - me
No one knew. And the game’s demanding credit cap (four quarters to start, and ANOTHER four for each continue) made it virtually impossible to investigate and master the game through play. Every year in the summer, I went to the same shitty resort in the Catskills with my cousins, and every year we would spend hours in the arcade trying to catch this bird, and every year failing. Before our very last trip there ended, I managed to snap a photograph of it in all its shadowed glory with my shitty fold-up phone, and put it online in the hopes someone could help solve the mystery. No one ever did. There was footage of the game on Youtube for a while, so I knew emulation was possible, but absolutely nothing about the Moa, which is what we all thought it was at the time. That was seven years ago.
In October I came upon a barebones fanwiki devoted to the arcade game (not the shitty Wii/DS versions either, which all but pruned everything that made the original fun and effectively turned it into glorified shovelware). It was there that someone mentioned the way to trigger this boss was S-ranking the 3rd stage. I never knew that as a kid because, again, we either grew too frustrated or ran out of quarters before any progress could be made. I downloaded an emulator, and finally got the game running after a long period of trial and error. As expected, catching this thing was a fucking doozy, and it’s no surprise I couldn’t do it as a kid. S-ranking the third stage requires S-ranking ALL the stages before it as well, since rankings are determined by the points stacked from the current level in addition to previous levels. It took some practice but eventually I fulfilled the requirement and caught the Phororharcos, ending one of the strangest and most enduring mysteries of my childhood.
I made it a point to snap screenshots so I could be the first person to share footage of it in action because no one else ever will.
