Jungle Life

Jungle Life is Emmepi’s unauthorized rebuild of Gottlieb’s 1973 Jungle Life — a bootleg copy of the American game reconstructed from scratch in the Electromechanical era. Its Jungle theme came straight from the donor, which Gottlieb had itself tailored to the Italian trade: Jungle Life was the single-player, add-a-ball member of a three-machine family — its four-player replay sibling sold as Jungle and its two-player replay sibling as Wild Life — and it was built specifically for export to Italy.^[1] The three shared one playfield across different player counts, and the export edition was the scarcest: 2,731 were built against 5,775 of the domestic four-player Jungle, so the genuine American machine was thin on Italian floors and ripe for copying.^[2] Emmepi was one of several Italian firms to reconstruct it outright — LORI and Zaccaria issued their own versions as Jungle Life and Jungle Life. Emmepi’s own catalogue was narrow, pairing this jungle table with a copy of Gottlieb’s export Card King, catalogued as Card King.^[3]