January '93
"The Aladdin Deck Enhancer is a master cartridge interface which connects to an entire range of games published on Compact Cartridges. When connected together, a complete game cartridge is formed, ready to plug into a games deck - same as a regular cartridge."
Included free with the Aladdin was the game Dizzy the Adventurer.
Articles
Producing cartridges, especially NES cartridges was an expensive business with high inventory costs. Codemasters came up with a great way to reduce costs by putting more components into a cartridge adaptor called the Aladdin. This would be sold at the price of a regular cartridge whilst further Codemasters NES games could be sold at half the price to plug into the Aladdin.
To make Aladdin a more attractive purchase it needed to include a game and it was decided to make that game Dizzy the Adventurer. We based this on the very successful Dizzy, Prince of the Yolkfolk.
Sadly Aladdin failed in the US market with Camerica, it’s exclusive distributor, going bust. We then converted the game to the Sega Master System, Game Gear and the MegaDrive and they were included in the Dizzy Excellent Collection - along with Panic! Dizzy and Go! Dizzy Go! Sadly Codemasters produced only a very small production run of this making them extremely rare. The Megadrive version wasn’t released at all.
The Map (NES)
