Mystery World Dizzy
A rediscovered NES reinterpretation of Fantasy World Dizzy, restored for digital release before a later physical cartridge edition.
Image credits and source
Original cover / promotional artwork
Credit: Fusion Retro Books — artwork belongs to its respective rights holders
Source: The Oliver Twins archive
Game at a glance
- Status
- Classic
- Released
- 2017
- Platforms
- Nintendo Entertainment System
- Genres
- Adventure, Platform
- Developer
- The Oliver Twins and their team; Łukasz Kur (restoration)
- Publisher
- Fusion Retro Books
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. The restored digital version appeared in 2017; the physical Kickstarter cartridge edition followed in February 2018.
Making the game
Our favourite Spectrum Dizzy game had always been Fantasy World Dizzy - the last full Dizzy adventure we wrote ourselves. With the needed get another Dizzy game out quickly onto the consoles it seemed another good candidate. As a business, we were running out of money, had some good staff and we’d be able to direct people very easily to make an updated slicker version of this game. We knew that once looking at it, we’d want to go back and change some things. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and the original games at been written at home, in a couple of months and with no involvement of feedback from others. So this gave us an opportunity to take onboard players views, and ideas we had ourselves and produce a much better Dizzy game, but still based on the classic Fantasy World Dizzy.
Along with several other NES games, this was sadly not released by Codemasters. The source code was re-discovered in ‘17 in Philip’s loft. As with Wonderland Dizzy and Dreamworld Pogie it was tidied up by Lukasz Kur who made a new master. Another great new illustration was produced by Piotr ‘PIT’ Gratkiewicz and Chris Wilkins organised another Kickstarter campaign for real boxed NES Cartridges in October of ‘17. Five hundred cartridges were produced and sent to backers in February ‘18 with all royalties given to SpecialEffect.
It was good to see our work finally released, sadly we never got any money for this or most of the console games we wrote for Codemasters, but a large part of writing games is to see them enjoyed and appreciated by the players.