After All These Years, It’s Moon Child

You likely have not played the Dutch platformer Moon Child. The game was developed by Team Hoi and started its life on Amiga in 1993, only to eventually end up on Windows after a troubled development and a limited release. But thanks to an excellent write-up from the blog Games That Weren’t about the unfinished Amiga version, as well as a post featuring the main theme going viral on Bluesky, Moon Child has taken on a new life. This is due to the fact that the theme for the game goes crazy hard. People can’t get enough of Moon Child.

Moon Child’s unreleased Amiga theme is distinct from the final Windows theme, particularly when it comes to the lyrics. In particular, the lyric “you’ve got the power to be his friend” is a challenge and affirmation to the listener. The song, sung by composer Ramon Braumuller, was recorded on an ADAT multitrack and sampled by the Amiga. It is interspersed with samples and goes like this:

It’s Moon Child.
Wah-ah-wo-ho.
You’ve got the power to be his friend.
It’s Moon Child.
Wah-ah-wo-ho.
“It’s the beginning of a new and excitingly different story!”
(This last line is a sample originally from The Adventures of Superman radio series, probably via a sample CD. The Chrono Trigger arrange CD The Brink of Time also samples this.)

It’s Moon Child.
Wah-ah-wo-ho.
You’ve got the power to be his friend. (4x)
“The story…is true.”
(This sample is originally from Dragnet [1987], but the sample as edited appears in The Art Of Noise - Dragnet [Art Of Noise '88 12" Mix])

Moon Child is having its moment in the sun now, but what led to its development is a rocky history.

Difficult times

Moon Child was the product of Dutch software developers Team Hoi. Their first outing in 1992, Hoi, was also a platformer, starring a little green guy named Hoi. Team Hoi had become frustrated with how their first game had turned out, in part due to how the game was handled by multiple publishers, starting with Innerprise Software.

“When Hoi was about 60 percent finished, Innerprise Software asked us to send them the latest version of the game, for internal evaluation and testing purposes,” developer Metin Seven told me via email. “About three weeks later the Hoi version we sent to Innerprise turned out to have been leaked to the Amiga hacker Fairlight, and was rapidly being copied by Amiga users around the world.”

This led the team to cancel their agreement with Innerprise and move to a developer known as Hollyware. “But following the release of Hoi, Hollyware never paid us any royalties apart from a $200 cheque ‘for the release celebration party,’” Metin told me. Unable to fight back legally, they took their lumps, only for a deception similar to the Hollyware situation to happen to them again with the release of their game Clockwiser and UK publisher Rasputin Software. 

“Both Hoi and Clockwiser were received warmly by the international game press, which made the events with the publishers even more sour.”

Undeterred, Metin said, the team vowed to create a new platformer for the Amiga starring an elfin green creature with Hoi as the sidekick. By the time they had finished the game Commodore had gone bankrupt, making Amiga’s future uncertain and publishing on the platform a rocky prospect at best. Eventually they would transition the game entirely to Windows, ditching Hoi as a sidekick and focusing on Moon Child. 

Unfortunately for Team Hoi, the company they had made publishing arrangements with, Dutch multimedia company Valkieser, had made the disastrous choice to invest heavily in both hardware and software for the Phillips CD-i, one of the most infamous console bombs in gaming history. The lack of funds caused them to terminate their publishing wing and, as a result, the Windows version of Moon Child’s release was limited to the Netherlands. 

“Later, we found out that the game had lived a life of its own in the worldwide piracy circuit, and I still receive e-mails every now and then from people expressing the childhood joy Moon Child delivered, which is really heart-warming,” Metin told me.

A Second Life

Thanks to the aforementioned viral post about Moon Child, its unreleased theme has taken on a life of its own. The bumping track has its roots in the Commodore 64 and the demo scene. Composer Ramon originally created a music editor called SIDmon to create his earliest music. “Later, we developed a new, more capable music editor called Digital Mugician, which was capable of adding three CPU-powered audio channels to the Amiga's four audio chip channels.” Metin said “The Moon Child Amiga demo title track was made with that.”

“I started playing drums at age six and joined bands by 12. In the 90s, my brother and I produced house music in our parents' home studio under the name 'The R,'” Ramon told me via email. “I believe the blend of those house influences with the Amiga demo scene tracker music formed the foundation for the Moon Child track.” 

I became aware of Moon Child as fan art and memes began to drip into my feed on the 15th of April. Edits, often by user @ricesnot.bsky.social, began to flood the timeline. Fanart from various artists built up. What was once an obscure character in a vintage Dutch Windows game was now an object of adoration.

In response to this long overdue love, Metin uploaded all the source files and assets to the game onto the Internet Archive. “I almost can't express how joyful it is to witness all the love for Moon Child and our other games,” Metin told me “It's a wonderful, surreal, wild ride, and it pretty much makes up for the repeated bad luck we experienced during our game development years.” 

Though the team had moved on from game development after a rocky run, this sudden outpouring of love feels like a kind of karmic payback. Moon Child had always been with us, a green-eared little guy lurking in the background, waiting for decades for the people to realize that they had the power to be his friend.