Retro Redux: Duck Tales

What was the best thing about the 80’s? Was it parachute pants or bangles? Flock of Seagulls or Duran Duran? The answer is, of course, none of those. It was the resurgence of video games thanks to the NES and the fact that licensed properties made good games back then. They weren’t made to take you through the same adventure the character in a movie or a TV show had. They simply took basic concepts from the property and threw them in a video game.

Our Retro Redux today is probably the best example of that. Duck Tales for the NES was, in my opinion, the best game based on a movie or TV show and rivaled many games of that era. There aren’t many people who owned an NES who didn’t love this game if they played it and it’s for good reason. The game is simply classic platforming at its best.

Released in September of 1989 by Capcom, it was one of the few titles that didn’t have the word Mega Man at the front they were involved with. It took many of the elements of the Blue Bomber’s adventures and put them in a setting people would instantly recognize. Duck Tales featured some unforgivable platform elements set in a beautifully rendered version of Scrooge McDuck’s world. The basic premise of the game was simple. Scrooge wanted to be the richest duck in the world and it was your job to help him. There was no elaborate set up to get involved with the story. You simply were given a title screen then a list of five areas to play through and you set off collecting as much treasure as you possibly could.

Duck Tales featured five worlds; the Amazon, Transylvania, The Moon, African Mines, and The Himalayas. You could pick any of these you wanted and play through them in any order. Each of the levels featured a very non-linear path that you could follow and many times you would find yourself going back over places you had previously been just exploring everything there was to see in the world. The end of each of these levels also contained a treasure worth $1,000,000 that Scrooge was trying to find. They were guarded by bosses, who were mostly generic and unforgettable. The one exception was the villain Magica DeSpell who awaited you at the end of the Transylvania level. Once you accumulated all the treasures each of the worlds contained you were transported back there for the final showdown with Magica and Flinthart Glomgold.

The big hook with Duck Tales was the cane mechanic. Scrooge carried a cane with him that he could use to hurl large boulders at enemies like a golf ball. It could be used to bounce over thorny areas that you would otherwise get hurt trying to cross. It could be used to fling treasure chests into walls and break them. It was one of the most versatile “weapons” of that gaming era. It was a simple item to use, but in order to master it you spent a lot of time practicing. You would have to jump and press down on the D-pad as well as the B button in order to use it as a pogo stick. You could then launch yourself high in the air or land on the head of enemies to kill them. It was a great item that people still remember fondly to this day.

The levels themselves rivaled anything you would find on the system at that time. Everything was extremely well designed; brightly lit and vibrant. There were hidden paths everywhere that you wouldn’t think to look and most likely stumbled across accidentally. It was the closest thing you could get to watching a Saturday morning cartoon and I can bet you spent almost as much time playing this game as you did watching the show it was based on.

There were cameos by a number of characters in the show. Most of them were simply to tell you little things, like maybe one of your nephews had been kidnapped and you needed to find them in another level. Launchpad McQuack was available in every level to take you back to Duckburg early for whatever reason it would be. Maybe you just wanted to replay some of the level to get more money or you found an item that was useful in another level. Mrs. Beakley would give you health replenishing items. It was a virtual who’s who from the TV show.

Probably most well remembered is the audio from the game. The music from the Moon Level has been redone more times than Kathy Griffin’s face has. Every level had a song that you couldn’t get out of your head and even years later if you heard a small part you could hum the rest of the tune from memory. It was some of Yoshihiro Sakaguchi’s most memorable compositions.

There were even multiple endings that could be gained based on how well you did in the game. IF you collected over $10,000,000 and found both the hidden treasures, which I won’t reveal even today, you got an ending that showed Scrooge in the newspaper with a crown on his head and a new headline. There was a bonus that you could get with Launchpad that would make this much easier to accomplish.

Now let’s move on and talk very briefly about the Game Boy version of the game.

Released a year later this version has everything the NES version had scaled down a bit. The levels were not as big and didn’t have as much going on. This was simply something that had to be done to get games onto the smaller system. This didn’t diminish the quality of this game any. It was just as hard, but just as fun as it’s console counterpart. It really gave you the ability to take Duck Tales on the road with you.

The graphics for this game were just as good as the NES version of the game and had just as much quality even though the screen was smaller. Everything was just as detailed, the only difference was this was done in the monochrome fashion of the Game Boy. You just didn’t get the vibrant color palette.

The controls were actually a little bit easier in the portable version. In order to do the pogo jump with Scrooge’s cane you simply had to press the B button rather than doing to combo of B and down on the D-pad. This made the platforming a little easier, but the jumps were still just as unforgiving as the console version. Also gone were some of the enemy placements that made jumps hard on the console. It was just not possible to get bees flying over every gap in the Amazon because it would cause the system to slow down too much.

Duck Tales is a very hard game to come by in a vintage store and if you do find one it’s going to cost you a bit of a premium. This is because it is just simply remembered so fondly by everyone that played it and if they own a copy they’re not going to get rid of it. There aren’t many games in a console library that can lay that claim to fame, but Duck Tales is one of them. It simply combined everything that gamers wanted back then into one brilliant package that was the best the system could offer.

This was a licensed game made for gamers and enjoyed by gamers everywhere. If you’re listening Capcom, do whatever it takes to get this game on the Virtual Console so a new generation of gamers can enjoy it.

Note: Due to this Retro Redux posting early I will have another posted tomorrow, Friday, when you should normally be getting them. So you get a bonus Retro Redux this week.