Ghana Bwana is an original arcade game by Steve Bjork, although it has some inspiration from the arcade game Congo Bongo. He programmed this one under his own company, instead of Datasoft, as
he did on most of his earlier games that were published through Radio Shack. If one takes a disk editor and goes through the
original disks, one will discover a lot of messages from Steve, including a reference to Ghana Bwana II (which was
never released...if Steve is reading this, did you ever get any of that done?)
The game itself came with a little comic book that described all the stages of the game, and the game
actually adds some songs and speech if you have the Sound/Speech pak. The game has 7 or 8 stages,
of which 4 are pictured above. Basically, you have to collect map parts (designated by white squares),
until you finish completing the map of the next level, after which you actually go to the next level.
You face a variety of obstacles along the way, including sharks, natives shooting you with
crossbows, boulders, pits, etc. The game itself plays in a pseudo 3-D landscape, similiar
to Steve's earlier smash, Zaxxon. The ultimate goal is to escape aboard your outrigger canoe, with a hot
air balloon attached.
Title: Ghana Bwana
Author: Steve Bjork (SRB Software) (Initial design by Mark Siegel)
Publisher: Radio Shack/Tandy
Released: 1984
Requires: Color Computer 1,2,3, 64K RAM, disk, joystick optional.