Some interesting info for you Vic
Escape/Westone had a licensing arrangement whereby they owned the rights to the game, but Sega retained rights to the main characters, bosses, and names. Because of this they teamed up with Hudson Soft to produce a conversion of the game for the NES, under a new license. To get around the licensing issue, Hudson Soft simply had the graphics of the main character and the title changed. The result was Adventure Island, which instead of featuring the generic boy character, inserted a caricature of Takahashi Meijin (known as Master Higgins in English games), who bore a striking resemblance to the original character design except for the adjusted hair color, trademark hat and characteristic underbite. The game was, however, Wonder Boy in all but name. In this arrangement, once again, Hudson Soft retained the rights to the character and name, allowing them to continue to produce future games using the Adventure Island name and characters. These sequels are not based on the Wonder Boy sequels but instead continue the style of gameplay from the original Wonder Boy.
Hudson released Champion Takahashi's Adventure Island for the MSX. This version featured Master Higgins as the main character but retained the music of Wonder Boy, unlike the NES Adventure Island which had a completely different soundtrack.
Escape/Westone repeated the same kind of task by converting Sega's 1991 beat 'em up arcade Riot City, into Hudson Soft's 1992 TurboGrafx-CD title Riot Zone.
Through their 2012 absorption of Hudson Soft, Konami currently owns the rights to the Adventure Island series.
