Whilst developing Ghost Hunters, Philip was frustrated that the player character’s head was limited to 3x3 pixels with only 3 colours. He doodled within Panda Sprites for a few hours on a character that was essentially a large face fitting within the available sprite space. There was only space left to put feet and hands, and only enough resolution and colours to make them look like red boxing gloves and boots. With a little more doodling Philip added multiple expressions, idol animations and a spin jump. The character looked pretty cute, so we recompiled Ghost Hunters with the new character and had him running around the Haunted Mansion which was clearly the wrong setting. As a result, we said we’d come back to this character and make a suitable environment and game for him in the future.

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We were big cartoon fans, regularly having a coffee break at 4.00 to watch kids cartoons, and were inspired to set Dizzy in a magical kingdom inspired by cartoons like The Smurfs, Dungeons & Dragons and Count Duckula. The codebase was essentially Ghost Hunters, but we wanted to add more meaning to the objects collected and decided that we’d turn this into a more puzzle-oriented adventure game, much like the classic text adventures we’d played a few years earlier like Zork, (Apple 2), Philosopher's Quest (BBC B) and Sphinx Adventure (BBC B).

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The C64 version was coded by Ian Grey, who did a fantastic conversion and would do all future C64 Dizzy games. Codemasters arranged all conversions allowing us to get on with the next games, as a result, we’ve never met him or many of the people that did the conversions of our games.

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We requested Codemasters put the flash “The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure” on the cover as that’s what we were trying to create despite the fact it was on low-resolution 8-bit computers. They were very concerned that the game wouldn’t sell and added “By the Oliver Twins authors of GRAND PRIX SIMULATOR!” hoping to capitalise on the success Grand Prix Simulator was enjoying.