The game stars the green-haired Joe and the blue-haired Mac, cavemen who battle through numerous prehistoric levels using weapons such as boomerangs, bones, fire, flints, electricity, stone wheels, and clubs.

The original arcade version and Amiga, Mega Drive/Genesis, MS-DOS and Zeebo ports have the distinction of allowing the player to select between different routes at the end of boss battles.

[5] A Game Boy version, released in North America and the United Kingdom in April 1993,[6][7] was developed by Motivetime and was also published by Data East.

[8] Finally, in late 1993, another version was developed by Eden Entertainment Software and published by Takara for the Sega Genesis and TecToy for the Brazilian Mega Drive in early 1994.

[11] The One reviewed the arcade version of Caveman Ninja in 1991, calling it "a cutesie 'jumpy-jumpy' game which uses some good graphics and neat comic touches to overcome the unoriginal gameplay", recommending it as being "worth a try".

[22] Skyler Miller of AllGame criticized the NES version for its "unresponsive controls", writing that "jumping and simultaneously throwing your weapon, an important move, is often hard to perform".

[16] Brett Alan Weiss of AllGame praised the Genesis version's graphics, sound effects and music, but criticized the game's two-player mode.

Controls are responsive, the graphics are good and the sampled sound is excellent, but I couldn't help feeling that in these times of epic Amiga games, this one is just a little too limited".

Melliar-Smith praised the multiplayer option as being superior to single-player mode, and also complimented the sound effects, but called the music repetitive and not creative.

[14] David Upchurch of The One Amiga called the plot and gameplay "uninspired", also criticizing the graphics (specifically its colour palettes as garrish and sprites appearing in the backgrounds), its unresponsive controls and the game's difficulty, but praised the sound.

I had to spend almost five minutes reading the manual just to work out how to select which of the two pointlessly-complicated joystick modes I wanted to use [...] and I still haven't quite got to grips with how to toggle the music and sound effects".

The Japanese version of the SNES game Congo's Caper was presented as a sequel called Tatakae Genshijin 2: Rookie no Bōken and featured a new protagonist.

An arcade sequel titled Joe & Mac Returns eschewed the scrolling action of the original games in favor of gameplay similar to another Data East series, Tumblepop.