
In the mid 80's Sega had a little game on the Master System called Wonder Boy. This game centered around the main character, Tom Tom' quest to rescue his girlfriend Tanya from Drancon. Now, This game wouldn't be at all important to video game history if it weren't for a very strange licensing agreement Sega had with original developer Westone. In the agreement, Sega retained the rights to the Wonder Boy name and the characters therein, but Westone kept the rights to pretty much everything else in the game. Meanwhile, Westone had a licensing agreement with Hudson Soft, which led to a knockoff of Wonder Boy being made. This knockoff was called Hudson's Adventure Island. After minor tweaks were made, Tom Tom was now known as Master Higgins in this new game while Tanya was know Princess Leilani. For whatever reason, Adventure Island wasn't the original of the two games, but it fared much better commercially than Wonder Boy did. This was probably dude to Adventure Island being available on the Nintendo Entertainment System, while Wonder Boy appeared on the Master System, which was in far fewer homes. Sequels to Wonder Boy were quite different from the original,

I LOVED Wonder Boy. Played it in the arcasde and had it at home on the Master System. That game was amazing. One of the few hard arcade games back in the day that I put in the effort to properly master and finish. The sequel was cool too, but you're right, that it was really different.
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