Fantastic Dizzy

Development and publication

Development: The Oliver Twins (NES); Codemasters and additional teams (ports). Publication: Camerica (NES); Codemasters.

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

Making the game

We visited CES (The Consumer Electronic Show) in Las Vegas in the first week of January 1990 and we were staggered by the size and potential market that the NES console created. Nintendo was heading towards an installed base of 20 million consoles! Many games were selling in their millions and even poor games were selling hundreds of thousands. Not only that, but they were also selling at around 8 times the price of what Codemasters were selling our games for in the UK and they were unpiratable! We looked at the quality of the games and were convinced we could write games that would equal the best.

We spent January getting to grips with the NES development kits that Codemasters had provided us and the new console. By the end of the month and with BMX Simulator on the NES complete we decided the best way to break into the market was with a very high-quality Dizzy game. Working with Codemasters we decided on a cartridge size of 256Kb ROM which to us was massive! All Spectrum games fitted in 34Kb each - so this was seven and half times bigger! With this immense challenge in front of us we moved to Leamington Spa to be closer to Codemasters and some artists. We also brought Peter Williamson onto our team to create Dizzy's best game ever!

Sadly working at Codemasters meant working in Portacabins - not the luxury many people thought we would be experiencing given the number of bestsellers we’d written.

The game was a large adventure that attempted to take the best bits of the previous dizzy games, tie them all together and add several mini-games.

We completed The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy in seven months, so far longer than we’d ever spent on a game before, so that it was ready for a Christmas release into America. Sadly, due to the legal battle that Nintendo and Galoob, Codemasters North American distributor were having over Game Genie, its release was delayed until November 1991. By this time attention was starting to shift to the 16-bit consoles - SEGA’s Megadrive (called Genesis in the US ) and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) which significantly damaged the sales potential. However, it was awarded NES Adventure Game of the Year by Game Players Magazine and given the coveted Parents Choice Award. N-Power reviewed it at 90% - the same as Super Mario Bros!

When released in the UK, we shortened the name to Fantastic Dizzy and Codemasters arranged for other developers within Codemasters to convert it to the ST, Amiga, MegaDrive & PC, whilst we set up an office and hired people to convert it to Sega Master System and Game Gear.

Original documents

Archived Fantastic Dizzy document (PDF)

Archived Fantastic Dizzy article 1 (PDF)

Archived Fantastic Dizzy article 2 (PDF)

Archived Fantastic Dizzy article 3 (PDF)

Sources

• Wikipedia