Scrooge McDuck—bless his bagpipes—broke the curse by helping me find an NES treasure.
I have to say: Considering how incredibly disinterested I was in cartoon-to-video-game adaptations and games based on licensed properties, it was something of a miracle that Disney's DuckTales was able to capture my imagination and become one of my favorite NES games.
It didn't happen right away, of course. Early on, when I first learned of the DuckTales video game, I was naturally skeptical of it. "There's no way that I could ever like such a game," I thought. It simply had too much working against it. To start, it had the unfortunate distinction of being both a cartoon-to-video-game adaptation and a licensed game, and to me, those were two of the worst things that you could possibly be. And, also, I had no real interest in the DuckTales property, itself. I rarely watched the cartoon, and whenever I did, I'd usually get bored within minutes. I just couldn't get into it. (Though, I loved the show's amazingly spirited title theme and would often tune in just to hear that!)
I couldn't even conceive of a scenario in which a game starring Scrooge McDuck, who I best remembered as the elderly grinch from Mickey's Christmas Carol, could be any good. Two specific forces would always prevent me from doing so. The first was my memory of playing Hudson's Mickey Mousecapade, which, initially, was a delightful, creative platformer whose wonderfully cheerful aural and visual qualities were so incredibly alluring that they made consider buying myself a copy of the game. That's how I felt, at least, until I reached the second stage, at which point the game became so cruel and abusive that I felt as though I was under assault. "This is just plain unpleasant," I thought to myself as yet another seemingly unavoidable tidal wave smacked into me. "I can't imagine ever wanting to play this nightmare game again!"
With Mickey Mousecapade my only evidence, I concluded that Disney games were "unfairly difficult" and thus best avoided.
The other discouraging force was my strong disinterest in games that were based on movies and television shows--including movies and shows that I loved (I don't recall how or when I developed this aversion, no; all I can tell you is that, for as long as I can remember, I've been intensely bored by the idea of these two mediums crossing over). DuckTales was one of those, so it automatically had a huge strike against it.
So you'd think that DuckTales had no chance of finding a place in my life.
DuckTales, despite its having so much working against it, managed to power its way into my life and quickly secure a place on my "Favorite NES Games" list--a list that included such heavyweights as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Contra, Super Mario Bros. 2, Mega Man 2 and Rygar. That's how deeply impactful it was. It was such a special game, I thought, that it deserved to be counted among those that I considered to be all-time classics.
It's just too bad, though, that I don't remember anything about the introductory period or what my very first DuckTales experience was like. I recall that nearly all of my friends and cousins owned a copy of the game and that I got to play it just about anywhere I went, yeah, but for whatever reason, I simply have no memory of the exact starting point.
So DuckTales, much like Contra, has the unfortunate distinction of being a beloved favorite of which I have no indelible "first memory," which is sad because I consider the memory of my first experience with a beloved game to be a vitally important aspect of my relationship with it. But with DuckTales, regrettably, I have no such memory. I don't recall where or when I first played it.
Also, I have no knowledge of the game's early history. I don't know when, exactly, it was released or at which point it exploded in popularity. None of my friends knew, either. That's always been the weird thing about DuckTales: No one seems to know where it came from, and trying to pinpoint the moment in time in which it appeared is a lot like attempting to discover the universe's origin. You get the same answer: There is no origin. DuckTales was always there. And the nature of its existence is simply beyond our human understanding.
The only thing I can say for certain is that DuckTales was an important game to my friends and I.
DuckTales told us so much about Capcom's moxie. Here we had a developer that was dealing with a very difficult question: "How do you craft a game around a physically limited elderly duck and make said game interesting to consumers?"
Well, the average developer, we knew, wouldn't have even asked itself that question. Rather, it likely would have elected to take a pre-made game and simply insert Scrooge and friends into it. And the result would have been the loosest of DuckTales interpretations--a game in which you were basically a feathered Mario variant stomping on and throwing bouncing eggs at random animals (whichever ones the creative director saw in the cartoon's intro), sentient currency, flying Beagle Boy heads, and a giant Flintheart Glomgold boss who attacked by throwing large repossession notices.
But for a super-ambitious company like Capcom, that type of tactic was clearly unacceptable. The correct thing to do, its developers obviously knew, was to reframe the question and instead ask itself, "How do we get around the subject-matter's inherent limitations and simply make the best game possible?"
And that was the development team's approach: It took some creative license and put all of its focus on producing an action-platformer that felt new and original. It applied some imagination and built a game around never-before-seen action mechanics that were both cool and fun to use. Mainly, it took Scrooge McDuck's walking cane and turned it into a handy device that functioned as both an object-striking golf club and a pogo stick that could be used to spring high into the air, bounce off of and thus eliminate enemies, traverse otherwise deadly terrain, destroy certain blocks, and crack open treasure chests.
Capcom's developers did what they were apt to do: create a freshly new, amazingly fun video game--one that just happened to have the name "DuckTales" attached to it.
We saw it as one of the company's greatest successes.
The popularity of the DuckTales IP probably had a lot to do with the game's finding success, yeah, but we all knew that its fun action mechanics were what really cemented its popularity and gave it great staying power. They're what helped it to stand out amongst all of late-1989's big releases--a group that included other high-profile licensed games like Back to the Future, Fester's Quest and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It was better than all of them for obvious reasons.
The pogo-jump, in particular, was a huge draw. It was a brilliantly conceived action mechanic that was great fun to exploit. We loved it because it allowed us to wildly and freely bounce about stage environments, aggressively engage with enemies and use them as springboards, and use advanced aerial ability to access the highest of overhead spaces and thus discover cool secrets.
In DuckTales, simply bouncing around a stage's environments, in the most careless fashion, was one of the most fun things you could ever do in a video game!
But pogo-jumping and object-bopping were just a small part of the DuckTales experience. There was, of course, a whole lot more to the game. There were so many other fun things that you could do.
For one, there was the treasure-finding aspect.
Now, I was never a big fan of item-finding mechanics (like those in Adventure Island, Super Pitfall and Milon's Secret Castle) that required you to continuously and unsystematically jump about stage environments to uncover items that were hidden in random screen tiles, no, but DuckTales' actually worked for me. It worked because the game's movement mechanics were so fun and enjoyable that I wanted to continuously and unsystematically jump and pogo my way around and about stage environments. They made me want to launch myself up into every high-up space and squeeze myself into every nook and crevice and always do so with the hope that I'd uncover a hidden item--even if it was nothing more than the tiniest of gems.
Then there was the game's strong visual presentation.
DuckTales was a beautiful-looking game. Its characters and environments had rich color to them, its backgrounds and textures were superbly rendered, and its animation was topnotch. I was especially impressed with how it was able to so closely replicate the look of the cartoon's characters. I didn't think that it was possible to come so close on mere 8-bit hardware, but the designers, in all their zeal, showed me that I was wrong--that it actually was possible; they were able to create very convincing reproductions of Scrooge McDuck and friends.
I'd always held that the closer a game looked to the source material, the more authentic it felt. And DuckTales felt quite authentic.
Though, it was more so the NES' unmistakable visual and aural qualities that provided the game its defining personality. The characters belonged to the film medium from which they were born, yeah, but the game's five locales were pure NES creations. They looked and sounded like places that could only exist in the NES' magical-feeling world.
You had those like the Amazon (everyone's starting stage) with its neglected jungle environments, predatory enemies, and trap-filled caverns; and its wonderfully catchy musical theme that had the power to convince you that traversing such a dangerous place would somehow be great fun. And the unforgettable Transylvania, whose amazingly chilling musical theme provided the stage's tattered, mysterious castle a powerful spook factor and an atmosphere that was very reminiscent of Castlevania's; it was otherwise defined by its magical mirrors, empty suits of armor, illusion walls, and other imagination-stirring video-game-type objects and structures.
Each stage was endearing in its own way. Each contained some element that I'd take time to enjoy as I traversed its environments.
I was, for instance, very fond of the African Mines' cavernous setting. Its craggy, earth-colored environments reminded me of Rygar's Gran Mountain (a place I loved to visit and observe), and they served to provide the area a Guts Man-stage vibe, which I appreciated--mostly because I felt that DuckTales and the Mega Man games were connected in spirit. Part of the fun of playing through this stage was stopping to observe it and soak in its atmosphere.
The Himalayas wasn't as much fun to traverse as other stages (due to its ice physics and the way in which Scrooge would become helplessly embedded in the snow if he'd tried to pogo on it, which admittedly created for an amusing visual), no, but I loved its adventure-game-like style of level design (how it was comprised of series of interconnected caves and tunnels), its high-spirited musical theme, and its lively inhabitants--the cute borrowing rabbits that would suddenly dive out at you, the frolicking goats, and the hockey-mask-wearing ducks who would use their hockey sticks to slap ice blocks in your direction; the Himalayas' were the game's most creative enemies, I thought.
And then there was everyone's favorite stage: the Moon, which was one of gaming's most memorable settings. It held that distinction mostly because it had one of the most amazingly stirring musical themes ever heard in a game. The Moon's was one of those tunes that was so entrancing and so moving (in ways I struggled to describe) that I couldn't help but stop and listen to it for several minutes at time and all the while allow its inspiriting energy to infuse me and influence my thoughts. And the whole time, I'd wonder, "From which heavenly source did this incredibly touching tune emerge?!"
"If gods created music," I'd say to myself, "this is what it would sound like!"
Whenever I'd played DuckTales, I'd eagerly anticipate visiting the Moon stage. I'd make it my final destination, of course, because doing so made the most sense. It was my way of save thing best for last. The Moon stage, I felt, was the best place in which to make the final push because its music was so invigorating and insofar it delivered to me the message that I needed to hear at the time. It'd say to me, "You're almost there, kid, so channel all of your energy and start making that push to the end!"
The Moon theme's was the type of magic that only NES sound hardware could produce.
So yeah--DuckTales was a special game. It brought my friends and I so much joy. It was one of the most delightfully fun games we'd ever played.
That's not to say that I didn't have issues with the game, no. I had a few. For one, I thought that its collision-detection was a bit suspect. Most troublesome was a physics glitch that didn't allow for you to pogo off of a block or platform's edge. If you attempted to do so, the pogo animation would cancel out, and you'd limply fall to the ground. Thereafter you'd either (a) convulsively overcorrect and proceed to unintentionally walk off of the block or platform, potentially into a death pit, or (b) confusedly stand there while an enemy plowed into you. (I should mention, though, that this same glitch allows for you to stand on the edges of upward-pointing-spike tiles, so there's actually some benefit to it).
Also, I didn't like that the pogo jump required so much input. There was was no reason to have hold down on the d-pad when just pressing B would have been enough. Usually I'd forget to hold downward and jump into enemies or spikes like a dope. And I had a lot of trouble executing pogo jumps in narrow spaces because there was less time to act and I just couldn't input the commands fast enough. I'd fail 50% of the time.
I especially disliked that the pogo jump wouldn't execute if there was even the tiniest hint of diagonal influence. It would only execute if you were holding straight down. This was a problem in instances in which you had to initiate a pogo jump while on the move. At the time, naturally, you'd be holding forward on the d-pad, and if you tried to introduce downward influence while doing so, nothing would happen and you'd helplessly fall onto an enemy or spikes.
And I didn't appreciate how the game gave you only a limited amount of damage frames. The invincibility period was about one second, which was never enough time. So if you made a mistake and accidentally jumped directly into an enemy, there was a good chance that you would suffer two hits before you escaped its hitboxes. Talk about annoying.
My stance was that these flaws were forgivable because they were byproducts of newly created, experimental platforming mechanics. "Ambitious developers deserve some leniency," I thought. But still I couldn't deny that I found said flaws to be pretty frustrating.
In one of Transylvania's branching sections, you had to escape from the mine carts while they dropping into death pits, and to do so, you had to ... well, I'm not sure. The manual didn't have a section on mine-cart controls, so the only thing my friends and I could do was guess as to what the correct input was. Some of us thought that you had to push up plus jump to escape a mine cart while others were convinced that you had to press up then jump. So because we didn't know for sure, we'd often resort to simply mashing the up and jump buttons. And the result was that we'd escape from mine carts approximately 50% of the time.
Ultimately we decided that the best thing to do was avoid this section altogether. It was an optional path, after all, and there was no sense in trying to traverse it when the likely result would only be the total depletion of our life-stock (the odds of making three consecutive 50-50 jumps were terribly low).
Transylvania's mine-cart section was a classic "rough spot."
In the grand scheme, though, all of those were minor quibbles. The game's technical issues, for however annoying they were, had no chance of hindering my enjoyment of its action. They couldn't drag down what was otherwise a top-tier platformer.
Now, you might be wondering, "What about the game's lack of difficulty? Didn't you consider that to be a notable flaw?"
Well, no. I didn't, and I still don't. In fact, I think that calling DuckTales "easy" is a bit of a misnomer. It's not as challenging as a Super Mario Bros. or a Mickey Mousecapade, true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's "easy." My sense is that those who label it such are either unironically playing it in Easy mode or mistaking "short in length" for "easily beatable."
In truth, DuckTales is a fairly difficult game. Its bosses are pushovers, certainly, but its platforming challenges are no joke; they often require deft movement and a high level of precision. That remains the case no matter how you choose to play DuckTales. Even if you decide to disregard the game's exploration and treasure-hunting aspects and instead take the most direct path through each stage (and insofar ignore 75% of the game's content), you'll still have to face a number of harrowing challenges, and there's still a solid chance that you'll Game Over.
And I don't consider the game's short length to be a flaw, either, because I'm wise enough to know that a game's length doesn't determine its quality. Rather, the value of its experience does. And DuckTales' experience is an amazingly valuable one. That's why you constantly desire to return to it. Its why you'll likely play through it dozens of times over the years. And it's why DuckTales is worth far more than any of those 100-hour-long big-budget blockbusters that you play for a week and then never touch again.
DuckTales is the medium's best argument for short games.
Of course, I acknowledge that there's a lot of padding going on in DuckTales. It's kinda silly that the game makes you return to Transylvania in order to obtain a key that opens the door to the African Mines. There's no denying that this sequence exists merely to add 20-30 seconds to the game's length. Though, I would have been fine with the idea had the designers done more with it--had they restructured the Transylvania stage (like they did to Mega Man 3's Robot Master stages when the Doc Robots came to occupy them) and turned it into a labyrinth in which the key was cleverly hidden. At least then the Transylvania revisit would have been a substantive part of the game.
And later on, you're made to return to Transylvania a third time--this time for the endgame sequence (this is where we enter the territory of shameless asset reuse). Obviously it would have been better had the designers crafted an entirely unique final stage--one that was more climactic-feeling. Instead they return you to the same ol' Transylvania stage and make you traverse the same castle halls in the same exact fashion. The least they could have done was change the location of the transporting mirror! (I have to be honest, though: In my earlier years, I wasn't at all bothered by the game's recycling of the Transylvania stage because it was a place I loved to visit. It was one of my all-time-favorite video-game stages.)
But despite all of that, DuckTales still has great depth to it. There's a lot to see and a lot to do.
In fact, I'm still discovering new things about this game 25 years later. Whenever I watch one of my favorite Youtube personalities play through it, I learn about a secret area or a game mechanic that I never knew existed. I've learned recently that the Himalaya's middle portion has a secret room and that you can access by pogoing up through an inconspicuous-looking opening. It contains a 1up and an invincibility item.
Also, I was shocked to learn that you can enter an autoscrolling bonus stage if you request a flight from Launchpad when there's a 7 in your dollar-total's 10-thousands place. As you platform your way through this cloud-formed stage, a mini-copter-riding Gyro showers you with jewels. What a cool little Easter egg!
Trust me when I say that DuckTales' world is a lot more vast than you think.
And since I was such a big DuckTales fan, I was quick to grab myself a copy of the game!
In truth, though, it was a pure impulse purchase. And afterwards, I felt a bit regretful because what I'd done, really, is buy a game that I already owned. Though, I found the justification that I needed when (during the drive home) I examined the box's back cover: The screenshots revealed that the game wasn't a straight port, as I assumed; rather, it was a reworked version of DuckTales!
"That's great!" I thought. "Now I can enjoy a different flavor of DuckTales whenever I'm on the road!"
Well, it didn't work out that way.
I didn't enjoy my time with Game Boy DuckTales, and so I never once played it while on the road. It was a reworked version of the game, yeah, but that was to say "condensed." In comparison to the NES original, it was much smaller in scale and even shorter in length (if I recall correctly, I was able to beat it under 20 minutes in my first play-through).
I was appreciative of the designers' ambition to recreate the look of NES DuckTales and maintain its character proportions, certainly, but I could also honestly assess that this was a misguided approach. The Game Boy's screen resolution was of course much lower than the NES' (160x144 compared to 256x224), so the natural result was that Game Boy DuckTales' stages were claustrophobic- and cramped-feeling. At all times, I felt as though I barely had enough space to maneuver. And I kept thinking to myself, "What's the fun in playing DuckTales if I'm unable to joyously pogo around large, open spaces?!"
The answer was that there was no fun to be had.
Also, I felt that the stages were poorly structured and thus not nearly as explorable as their NES counterparts'. They were wholly straightforward in design and for that reason completely uninteresting. There was little to see or do. And that was what disappointed me most.
Game Boy DuckTales was, quite simply, a lesser version of one of my NES favorites. Playing through it felt more like a chore.
The designers' attempt to faithfully replicate NES DuckTales' graphics had a couple of other unfortunate consequences. Because the character sprites were so large, the Game Boy's meager hardware had trouble rendering more than two of them a time. Whenever a second enemy would wander onscreen, the game would slow to a crawl. The designers were obviously aware of this problem, and they chose to mitigate it by lowering the enemy rate. They lowered it so much, in fact, that stages now felt largely barren.
There was also a ton of slowdown during boss battles in which a lot of activity was occurring (like the Abominable Snowman battle, during which the screen shakes and multiple snowballs fall from the ceiling). These battles basically occurred in slow motion. Also, the lag trivialized the bosses' attacks because it allowed you to more easily read said attacks and maneuver around them.
And, inexplicably, you only had to strike bosses four times to defeat them! It was supposed to be five! "Why would they make that kind of change?!" I said while shaking my head. "Why try to make the game easier than it should be?!"
Also, the designers did a bad job of positioning hidden rooms. Often their entrances were placed in proximity to normal screen-transition points, and because Game Boy DuckTales' screen transitions occurred so slowly, it was hard not to spot said entrances. The slower transition provided you more opportunity to spy their locations. It was as if the game was eager to spoil its own secrets.
My sense was that Game Boy DuckTales' was an outsourced project and that its developers' philosophy was "less is more." If that was truly the case, then, well, those developers had a warped understanding of the phrase.
To the designers' credit, though, they did do one thing very right: They simplified the pogo controls! They programmed it to where you could now initiate a pogo jump simply by hitting the B button while aerial. They gave me exactly what I was looking for, and the result was that I was now more confident in my ability to execute pogo jumps when I was traversing cramped spaces and when I was hurriedly moving forward.
But that one improvement, alone, wasn't enough to make Game Boy DuckTales worth the price of entry. It needed much more than that. It needed to be equally or more fun than the NES original. Unfortunately, it was neither. So I had little use for it. I played it maybe three or four times in total over the course of two years.
And my being burned by Game Boy DuckTales is precisely the reason why I shied away from buying NES-to-Game Boy ports. I didn't need any more compromised, stripped-down NES games in my life.
Over the following two decades, I spent a lot of time hoping that Capcom would one day revisit the DuckTales brand and thus bring back something that had been sadly missing. "It's a shame that such a great concept has been abandoned," I'd always think. "Imagine how much better the gaming world would be if DuckTales were still around and thriving."
Though, when Capcom announced that WayForward was working on a DuckTales remake titled "Disney DuckTales: Remastered," I immediately felt disappointment. A DuckTales remake just wasn't what I was looking for. I wanted a new game--one that explored new ideas.
Also, I was skeptical of DuckTales: Remastered because its title included the word remastered, which carried a certain connotation. The very inclusion of that word made me fear that the game would be made with "modern sensibilities" in mind--that, specifically, its action would be buried beneath mountains of dialogue and scores of painfully long, superfluous cut-scenes.
And, well, the game certainly lived down to my expectations.
I'm not saying that Remastered is a bad game, no. It's pretty good, and I enjoyed my time with it. It's just that it misses the point. DuckTales' action is about exploration and freedom, not linearity and constraint. So as I was playing Remastered, all I could think about was how much I preferred the original DuckTales' fast-paced, interruption-free action. The whole time, I kept wishing that it was something else.
If you're someone who grew up with DuckTales, ask yourself this question: "Twenty years from now, which version of the game will I be more likely to return to?"
Your answer, I bet, is the NES original. And you choose it for an obvious reason: It stays out of your way, and thus it allows for you to have a fun, satisfying platforming experience in an ideal amount of time (20-30 minutes).
Now don't get me wrong: I'm glad that DuckTales: Remastered exists. I'm not thrilled with the direction it takes, no, but I appreciate that it works to keep the series alive and relevant. If nothing else, it puts the series back in the spotlight and helps to expose it to younger generations and thus create a broader fanbase. And if we're lucky, that growth will open the door for future DuckTales games!
And even if it doesn't work out that way, it won't be a complete tragedy because we'll still have the original DuckTales, which after 25 years is still one of the best platformers around.
So I'm happy to admit that my original skepticism was completely unfounded. Licensed games, it turned out, weren't all bad. That's what DuckTales taught me.
It taught me, also, that Disney plus Capcom equaled gaming bliss. Theirs was a magical partnership, and over the years, it produced a slew of prized classics across numerous platforms. And I was able to derive great entertainment from many of those games. And it was all thanks to DuckTales.
As far as I was concerned, though, DuckTales was the best of Capcom's Disney games. It was, appropriately, the shiniest gem in the collection.
It's just too bad that it never got a real sequel!
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