Dreamworld Pogie

Development and publication

Development: The Oliver Twins and their team; Łukasz Kur (restoration). Publication: Fusion Retro Books.

The named development credit refers to the original or specifically identified version. Other ports and later re-releases may have different development teams.

Originally developed in the early 1990s and left unreleased. The restored edition was completed with Łukasz Kur, with physical editions organised by Fusion Retro Books.

Making the game

When we’d first visited the massive tradeshow in January ‘90, the game that caught our attention most was Super Mario Bros. It had sold over 20 million copies and we’d said at the time, it looked like a game we could write in a couple of months.

Two years later SEGA had produced Sonic which was also massively successful, whilst we’d produced 8 NES games and creating a simple side-on platform game seemed fairly easy and a fun challenge. We needed a fun character and chose Pogie who up until this point had always been cute. We thought it would be fun to have him turn aggressive on hitting a power-up.

We really felt we’d produced a great game and were devastated as it, along with several other games went unreleased.

Following the success of releasing Wonderland Dizzy through a Kickstarter campaign in ‘15, we asked Chris about doing a Kickstarter campaign exclusively for cartridges for this game. We searched Philip’s loft for the master or source code and found it along with 2 other unreleased NES games - Mystery World Dizzy and Panic! Dizzy. Lukasz Kur again took the source code, tidied it up a little and remastered it, whilst Piotr ‘PIT’ Gratkiewicz produced a great illustration.

The Kickstarter was launched in December ‘16 and 600 cartridges were produced and released in May ‘17 with all royalties going to SpecialEffect.

Original documents

Archived Dreamworld Pogie document (PDF)

Sources

• Wikipedia