Dead Moon on PC Engine: T.S.S.’s Third and Last Game, Its Skeleton Bosses, and the Sequel That Never Came

Dead Moon is a horizontal shooter that went on sale in Japan on 22 February 1991 as a PC Engine Hu-Card, product code TS91001, 7,400円 as the recommended retail price. The publisher was T.S.S., and the title printed on the box is DEAD MOON 「月世界の悪夢」 — “Dead Moon: Nightmare of the Moon World”.

It was the third game T.S.S. ever published, and the last. The Agency for Cultural Affairs Media Arts Database holds exactly three packages under that name: two Famicom sports games in 1989 and 1990, and this one. After February 1991 the label is not on anything. The game itself kept going without its publisher — Natsume put it out in North America in 1992 and back on the Wii in 2007 — but there was never a second Dead Moon. This guide covers what the cartridge is, who actually made it, why the Japanese title is a bad search term, and how the code finds the Hu-Card.

• Japanese title: DEAD MOON 「月世界の悪夢」, published by T.S.S.
• PC Engine (Hu-Card): 22 February 1991 · product code TS91001 · 7,400円, recorded by the Media Arts Database as the recommended retail price
• The publisher’s whole catalogue: three packages — スーパーラグビー (Famicom, 27 December 1989), ワールドボクシング (Famicom, 8 September 1990) and this game
• Who developed it is not settled: the game’s own credits list Studio Ducks and ZAP Corporation; Japanese reference wikis say Natsume, which is the company that published it abroad
• Not the Hu-Card: the North American TurboGrafx-16 release (Natsume Inc., 1992) and the Wii Virtual Console download (Natsume, 17 July 2007, 600 Wii Points) — the download can no longer be bought
• Every boss is a skeleton: bird, turtle, fish and finally a human skull, while the ordinary enemies are conventional science fiction

What is Dead Moon, and what is going on with the bones?

The setup, as MobyGames gives it in the game’s official description, is that a comet turns towards Earth two hundred years from now, Earth’s missiles deflect it into the moon, and alien war machines start gathering in the impact crater. You are the one ship the United Nations sends. There are six stages, on Earth, in space and on the moon, each with a mid-boss and a boss, and finishing them starts the game again with enemies that take twice the damage.

The weapon system is the part that is worth learning before you play. There are four main shots, colour-coded — Vulcan (yellow), Wave (green), Laser (blue) and Ring Beam (red, the only one that also fires backwards) — and two sub-weapons, Homing missiles and a Barrier. There is no separate power-up item: collecting the same colour again upgrades that shot, up to three levels, and collecting it once more at full power gives you a bomb. Taking a hit does not kill you; it knocks the shot down one level. So the power-up is also your armour, which is the design idea the whole game turns on. You can also change your ship’s speed while the game is paused, across four steps, and the ship is fast enough at its slowest that new players fly into things.

Then there are the bosses. Every one of them is made of bone — a skeletal bird, a skeletal turtle, a skeletal fish, and a final boss that is a human skeleton whose last form is a skull that throws itself at you. Nothing else in the game is like that: the ordinary enemies and mid-bosses are standard science fiction hardware. The Japanese reference wiki Game Catalogue calls the all-bone boss design unusual, and says the graphics, the parallax scrolling and the music were what magazines praised at the time. Reviews were mixed rather than glowing: scores collected on the English Wikipedia article run from 48% in Power Play and 5/10 in TurboPlay to 94% in Player One.

Who actually developed it?

This one does not have a clean answer, so here is what each source says.

The Media Arts Database records the package as published by T.S.S., with T.S.S. also as creator, and gives no development studio. MobyGames, which lists the game’s own credits — nineteen people, with Toyohiko Yoshimine on program and game design, M. Tamura and Kōichirō Kawahata on design and graphics, and music by Mamoru Ishimoda and Yōko Sonoda — files the developers as Studio Ducks and ZAP Corporation. Natsume is not in that credit list at all. The English Wikipedia article follows the same attribution: developed by Zap, designed by Studio Ducks.

Japanese reference wikis say something else. Game Catalogue introduces the game as one that “Natsume, which should have had no connection to the PC Engine, actually developed”, and that line is repeated widely in Japanese write-ups. Natsume is certainly in the game’s history: Natsume Inc. published the North American TurboGrafx-16 version in 1992, and Natsume brought the game to the Wii Virtual Console in 2007. Whether Natsume also built it in 1991, or whether the Japanese claim comes from those two roles, is not something we could settle from a primary source, so we are not asserting it either way.

Why was there never a second Dead Moon?

Because the publisher stopped publishing. Searching the Media Arts Database for T.S.S. returns three packages in total: スーパーラグビー (Super Rugby) for the Famicom on 27 December 1989, ワールドボクシング (World Boxing) for the Famicom on 8 September 1990, and Dead Moon on 22 February 1991. Two sports games and a shooter, fourteen months apart end to end, and then nothing. A label with three releases does not start a series.

What the game got instead was other people’s distribution. Natsume Inc. put it out in North America in 1992 under the same name. Sixteen years later, on 17 July 2007, Natsume released it on the Wii Virtual Console for 600 Wii Points — and that route closed again when most of the Wii Shop Channel’s functions were discontinued on 30 January 2019. It is also not one of the games on the TurboGrafx-16 Mini. So the 1991 Hu-Card is, once more, the way to play it on hardware.

What does the box actually say?

Two things worth knowing before you shop. First, the catalogued title is not the katakana you would guess: the package is recorded as DEAD MOON 「月世界の悪夢」, with the English words in Latin letters and the subtitle in Japanese quotation marks. Second, the database also records an alternate name for the package: HYPER SHOOTING, the genre line the box carries alongside the title.

The price is consistent across sources, which is not always true. The Media Arts Database gives 希望小売価格 7,400円, the Japanese catalogue site Picopico Daihyakka gives 定価 7,400円, and Suruga-ya’s product record shows 定価 ¥8,140 — the same figure with 10% consumption tax added. The database also carries a barcode for this row, 4988635100189, which is rare for a 1991 Hu-Card.

Where can you buy the Hu-Card today?

Suruga-ya: search the code. TS91001 returns exactly one listing in the default view, and it is this game: デッドムーン, dated 1991/02/22, maker T.S.S, ¥20,900 used on 28 September 2026, with a marketplace line from ¥9,410 across sixteen used copies. Asking the shop to show sold-out items as well returns five listings, all of them this game — a copy with a damaged manual, one that does not read reliably, one that smells of cigarettes, and one with no box or manual. The Japanese title works too and adds only a manual sold on its own.

Buyee: search the title with the platform, and do not search the title alone. デッドムーン PCエンジン returned two listings on 28 September 2026 and both were this game. The code TS91001 returned one listing, also this game. The bare katakana title デッドムーン returned 791, and of the first hundred exactly one was the game. The rest are a different Dead Moon entirely: the Dead Moon Circus from Sailor Moon, the Bikkuriman sticker called Queen Dead Moon, and a long tail of listings that merely contain デッドストック (“dead stock”) and ムーン somewhere in the title. This is the clearest example we have measured of why the house search is the title plus the platform.

Prices on both sites were what they were on the day we looked. This is a cheaper cartridge than most of the games in this series — the shop’s own copy was ¥20,900 and the marketplace started at ¥9,410 — but sixteen copies is a thin market, and thin markets move in steps.

Why search Kataban for this one?

Because the obvious search term lands on the wrong object, and the code does not. Checked in a desktop browser on 28 September 2026: TS91001 returns one result, the 1991 PC Engine Hu-Card. Dead Moon returns two, the Hu-Card and the 2007 Wii download. 月世界の悪夢 also returns both. But デッドムーン — the spelling almost everyone would type — returns one result, and it is the Wii download, because the catalog stores the Hu-Card under the box spelling DEAD MOON 「月世界の悪夢」 and the Wii row under the katakana one.

That is the whole argument for knowing the code. The card for the Hu-Card shows the platform, the 1991 date, the publisher T.S.S., the code TS91001 and the kana to look under on a Japanese shop shelf (テ) — and this code is in the Media Arts Database itself, so it was in the catalog from the start. Not every cartridge in this series had that: one of them had to have its code added to the catalog by hand.

Dead Moon · DEAD MOON 「月世界の悪夢」 · PC Engine Hu-Card, 22 February 1991 (TS91001) · T.S.S.

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp — code (TS91001) · Buyee — title (デッドムーン PCエンジン)
See the Hu-Card on Kataban →

A publisher with three games on its whole list was never going to run a series, and the two companies credited with building this one did not come back to it either. What is left is one Hu-Card from February 1991 with TS91001 on it, a download that stopped being sold in 2019, and six stages of skeletons.