Robin Hood: Legend Quest
A console-era return to Robin Hood's castle adventure, developed by the Twins and their team, with versions for home computers.
Image credits and source
Original cover / promotional artwork
Credit: Codemasters — artwork belongs to its respective rights holders
Source: The Oliver Twins archive
Game at a glance
- Status
- Classic
- Released
- 1993
- Platforms
- Nintendo Entertainment System, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga
- Genres
- Platform
- Developer
- The Oliver Twins and their team; Lyndon Sharp; Mark Bell; Damon Redmond
- Publisher
- Codemasters
Development and publication
Development: The Oliver Twins and their team; Lyndon Sharp; Mark Bell; Damon Redmond. 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
We’d always been super proud of our original break out hit Super Robin Hood and when looking for new game ideas for the NES it was a perfect candidate. The NES was great at platform games with its hardware scrolling and sprites.
We took the concept and enhanced it creating a great game that was called Super Robin Hood on the NES, however, when we then decided to convert it back to home computers we had a naming issue. One solution was to call it Super Robin Hood 2. For a while it was called Amazing Robin Hood, but Codemasters marketing department decided it should be called Robin Hood: Legend Quest.
During the creation of this game, we set up an office in Leamington Spa, since working from our small flat was now getting increasingly difficult. We employed Lyndon Sharp who had just completed Kwik Snax as a freelancer to write the Amstrad and Spectrum version which were excellent, but sadly a little too late in the life cycle of the computers.
We also employed Beno (Mark Bell) and Damon (Redmond) to convert the game to Atari ST & Amiga since they’d done such a great job of converting Kwik Snax to the ST & Amiga.
Sadly the original NES version was held back from being released due to issues with Nintendo and was released a year later as part of the Quattro Adventures pack.
Original documents
Archived Robin Hood: Legend Quest document (PDF)
Archived Robin Hood: Legend Quest article (PDF)