When Capcom got the Disney license, magic happened. DuckTales (1989) puts Scrooge McDuck through five stages you can take in any order, bouncing on his cane like a pogo stick to reach treasure and bop enemies.

The pogo is the whole game, and it's harder to do than it looks: you hold down and press the jump button, and Scrooge only stays bouncing while you keep holding. Get it wrong and you land on the spikes you were trying to clear. Get it right and you can cross a room without touching the floor, bounce off a boss's head repeatedly, and break open chests that ordinary jumps won't touch. There are speedruns built entirely out of chaining pogo hops down a slope.

The structure borrows from Mega Man, which makes sense given the studio. Five stages on a select screen, no required order, and a hidden path that sends you between Transylvania and the African mines. What it adds is money. Every gem and coin counts toward a final total, and the ending you get depends on how rich Scrooge is when the credits roll, which is an unusually in-character win condition.

The stages are the Amazon, Transylvania, the African mines, the Himalayas, and the Moon. That last one has the music. Ask anyone who played it and they're humming it right now, and the reason it works is that it's written like a proper pop song rather than a loop: verse, chorus, a bridge that goes somewhere, and then back around.

It's so fondly remembered that WayForward built a faithful HD remake in 2013, with the surviving cast of the cartoon back in the booth.

Few licensed games escape the cash-in label this completely. The pogo cane alone is worth the cartridge.