Hiroshige Tonomura · DuckTales · NES · 1989
A licensed Disney platformer from Capcom's Mega Man team, with a soundtrack whose Moon stage theme is routinely named the finest piece of 8-bit music ever written.
DuckTales was a licensed game, and licensed games in 1989 were not expected to have memorable music. This one was built by staff from Capcom's Mega Man series, and it sounds like it. The score was composed by Hiroshige Tonomura, with Yoshihiro Sakaguchi as sound programmer, and it gives each of the game's destinations — the Amazon, Transylvania, the African Mines, the Himalayas and the Moon — a theme with a clear character of its own. The Moon theme is the one that escaped. Polygon identified it as the most famous piece of music from the game, and Geekparty went further, calling it "the most perfect piece of 8-bit music ever written". WayForward's creative director Matt Bozon, whose studio made DuckTales: Remastered in 2013, called the soundtrack some of the best 8-bit music he had ever heard, singling out the Transylvania and Himalayas stages too. The remaster updated the music along with the graphics. The Moon theme then crossed back into the franchise that inspired it: it appears in the 2017 DuckTales animated series in scenes set on the Moon, most prominently as the basis of a lullaby sung by Della Duck.
Most NES music is remembered by people who played the game. The DuckTales Moon theme is remembered by people who did not: it circulated through remixes, covers and online lists of the best chiptune ever made until it had a life almost independent of the platformer it came from. Its structure helps — a long, yearning melody over a steady pulse, more song than loop, with a shape that survives any arrangement.
Its return in the 2017 cartoon completed an unusual journey. A tune written to accompany a licensed game about a cartoon became part of the cartoon itself, adopted by the franchise as though it had always belonged to it.