Hummer Team's Famicom/NES demake of Super Mario World from 1995 is probably one of the most impressive bootleg games in terms of scope, having taken over a year to develop according to Hummer Cheng.¹ It's far from perfect, but the degree to which it attempts to replicate the source material is admirable, and it's clear that a ton of work went into it.

One notable deviation from the source material, however, is the music that plays at the end of the game, which is decidedly not the ending music from Super Mario World.

^{(Click above to be taken to video)}

It's easy to assume that this song was just pulled from a previous project to save on time (this game was notably released in an incomplete state on the standalone cartridge), but that isn't the case. This piece is actually an arrangement of a track from an unlikely source: the title screen music from Colorful Dragon (aka Tagin' Dragon in the US), an unlicensed game developed by Sachen.

^{(Click above to be taken to video)}

It's a strange source pull, but not an insignificant one. Within the staff credits for Colorful Dragon, one 'Rolland Cheng' is credited as the sole programmer, producer, and composer.² Of course, this is one of many pseudonyms used by none other than Hummer Cheng, who got his start as a developer at Sachen before leaving to form his own development team. Being released in 1989, it's likely that Colorful Dragon was Hummer Cheng's first project. And clearly it was significant enough to get a homage at the end of Hummer Team's largest, grandest title six years later.

To me, this shows that despite the deceptive and often low-quality nature of these games (which to my knowledge were commissioned by the publishers), there was definitely heart and passion within some of the development teams. At the very least, it gave me more of an appreciation for Hummer Team.

^{1. http://bootleg.games/BGC_Forum/index.php?topic=679.0}

^{2. https://youtu.be/wmtmqfSTVQI}

2024 note: damn I don't think I can do youtube embeds with this setup atm... will have to look into this more.