Fast Food Dizzy
Dizzy races through food-filled mazes in an arcade spin-off, collecting snacks while avoiding pursuing enemies.
Image credits and source
Original cover / promotional artwork
Credit: Codemasters — artwork belongs to its respective rights holders
Game at a glance
- Status
- Classic
- Released
- 1989
- Platforms
- Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga, DOS
- Genres
- Maze, Arcade
- Developer
- The Oliver Twins (original development)
- Publisher
- Codemasters
Development and publication
Development: The Oliver Twins (original development). Publication: 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
Andrew and I loved Pac-Man. We became a little obsessed by the Apple IIe version on our friend’s computer. It was actually a clone called TaxMan and we had to play it on a small green screen.
A lot of our early BASIC programming revolved around simple maze games, nothing good enough to publish, but it helped us learn. By this time in our careers, we’d mastered programming on the Amstrad and Spectrum and had a fantastic development environment and engine.
It was a Friday afternoon in the first week of November and we were just starting into work on Grand Prix Simulator 2, and we were discussing that it would take about a month to complete and would, therefore, miss Christmas. We then wondered, could we write a game really quickly that could be released for Christmas, since this was such a good time to sell games. We came up with the idea of writing a maze game over the weekend. In fact, we challenged ourselves, if we didn’t sleep could we have it finished by Monday morning?!
Everything went quite well, all the code and maps were completed on time. We then spent another week adding presentation like the title screen, the Extra Life cartoons, improving the graphics and adding music.
Bruce Everiss, Head of PR & Marketing at Codemasters, had the idea of doing a deal with the Happy Eater chain of restaurants and got close to doing a great deal. Sadly this all took time and eventually they pulled out. We swapped the lead character to Dizzy and it was finally released in April ‘89. Whilst missing Christmas, it did really well and became the first non-adventure Dizzy game.
The 2020 FUZE and Nintendo Switch version
In November 2020, Fast Food Dizzy was reimagined for FUZE on Nintendo Switch. This version introduced ten mazes, ten editable mazes, a level editor and editable game source code, with new artwork by Jonathan Temples and new soundtracks.
“We really enjoyed re-imagining one of our classic original Dizzy games, so much so, that we just kept adding features. It was easy to learn, extremely intuitive and very powerful. We hope people enjoy the game, and find it challenging and inspiring.“ - Philip Oliver
“It's been fantastic working with the team at FUZE who so passionately believe, as do we, that the best way to encourage students to learn to code, is to give them the tools to help them make games. FUZE is the perfect solution as a stepping stone between Scratch and industry-standard languages such as C++, Java, Python and Lua that can be hard to get into.“ - Andrew Oliver
Original documents
Archived Fast Food Dizzy document 1 (PDF)
Archived Fast Food Dizzy document 2 (PDF)