What it was
Scrooge McDuck bounces on his cane like a pogo stick. That one move carries DuckTales. Hold the button in mid-air and he springs off enemies, spikes and rough ground; swing the cane on the ground and he whacks enemies and knocks objects about. Everything else in the game is built to give that bounce somewhere interesting to land.
There are five stages, the African Mines, the Amazon, the Himalayas, Transylvania and the Moon, and you can take them in any order. Each hides a treasure guarded by a boss, plus diamonds tucked in chests and secret corners. Two stages must be revisited for items you only find later, and the last fight takes you back to Transylvania. Your final bank balance picks one of three endings.
Where it sits in history
Capcom released it in North America in 1989, based on the Disney cartoon of the same name. It was the first licensed game Capcom developed itself, and it shared key staff with Mega Man: producer Tokuro Fujiwara, character designer Keiji Inafune and sound programmer Yoshihiro Sakaguchi. You can feel that lineage in the tight jump arcs and the pick-a-stage structure.
Licensed games of the period had a poor reputation, and this one did not deserve it. The NES version sold about 1.67 million copies and a Game Boy port in 1990 sold about 1.43 million, each Capcom's best seller on its platform. A sequel, DuckTales 2, followed in 1993, and WayForward released DuckTales: Remastered in 2013 with the show's surviving voice cast.
The music has outlived the cartoon's first run. The Moon theme is the piece most people remember, and the 2017 DuckTales reboot used it in scenes set on the Moon.
How it plays today
It is a joy for about an hour, and an hour is roughly how long it lasts. The pogo feels good the moment you find it, the stages are dense with secrets without being mazes, and the free stage order lets you back out of one that is giving you trouble. It looks bright and clean, and Scrooge animates with more personality than most NES heroes.
The catch is length. Once you know the routes, a full run is short, and the difficulty is gentle outside a couple of bosses. Hunting for the great ending, which asks for a big enough fortune, gives a second run some purpose. Treat it as a short, excellent game rather than a long one.
Compared with
- Mega Man 2: Same studio, same staff and the same pick-your-stage idea, but DuckTales trades the weapon puzzle for exploration.
- Super Mario Bros. 3: Both reward bouncing on everything; Mario gives you eight worlds, DuckTales gives you five compact ones.
- Batman: The Video Game: The same year's other licensed hit, much harder and far less forgiving, where DuckTales invites you in.
Why it matters
Scrooge McDuck already owns more money than anyone could spend, and still pogos through the Himalayas for one more diamond. DuckTales never pretends that makes sense, which is the joke and also the lesson. Even the ending you get depends on your final bank balance, so the counting never stops.
Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson argued that dopamine is more about wanting than liking: the pull toward a reward, not the pleasure of having it. Scrooge is that idea in a top hat, and so are we. A chest in a secret corner lights something up long before we know what is in it, and Michael Koepp's team saw dopamine release in the striatum of people playing a video game, so the pull is real. What rescues DuckTales from being a lecture on greed is the pogo. The wanting gets you bouncing, and the bounce turns out to be the thing you like. An hour later the money is just a number. The cane hitting a spike is what you remember.
Read: Wanting, not liking: what dopamine really does when you play →
- Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (1998). What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience? Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309-369.
- Koepp, M. J., et al. (1998). Evidence for striatal dopamine release during a video game. Nature, 393, 266-268.
Verdict · 8/10
The proof that a licensed NES game could be as good as anything on the shelf. Short, generous and still great fun to bounce through.
