Vultan's Theme (Attack of the Hawk Men) was composed by Freddie Mercury and the rock band Queen for the 1980 movie, Flash Gordon, where it plays when Hawk Men attack Emperor Ming's soldiers. This instrumental tune itself is a lesser-known one among the Queen repertoire, never released as a single and never performed live by the band.
However, movie's popularity caused it to be "borrowed" by a couple composers of video game music. None of the games that use the song ever gave the credits to Queen, but the song is very recognizable because of its bars. Due to the hardware constraints of the time, no game actually uses a recording of the song, they all use a lo-fi rearrangement with the same notes. This coupled with the freer copyright laws of the 1980s allowed to song to be used over and over again without any lawsuits.
The Apache Strike Theme seems to borrow from the song as well.
Games
Note: Flash Gordon games and Vanguard 2 don't use this song.
Vanguard (ARC)
Vultan's Theme is heard when the player touches an energy pod and gains temporary invincibility for as long as the song plays. The game's developer, Tose, used the song without permission. The song is played on a SN76477 audio chip.
Vanguard (A26)
Like the arcade game, Vultan's Theme plays when you touch an energy pod. The music fidelity is notably lower on the Atari 2600's TIA chip.
Vanguard (A52)
The Atari 5200 port is much closer to the arcade version than the Atari 2600 release, and the tune matches up with the arcade release quite closely. Vultan's Theme plays every time you touch an energy box. The song is played on the 5200's POKEY chip.
Vanguard (A8)
Like the arcade game, Vultan's Theme plays when you touch an energy pod in the Atari 800 game. It sounds close to the Atari 5200 version, most probably because the Atari 8-bit version was a hack of the mentioned console one, but is altered a bit.
It was rendered on POKEY, being a tune number 2 in the SAP rip.
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