Wonderland Dizzy

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

In early ‘92 we were still producing NES games hoping the distribution problems in America would be solved and hoping that the Aladdin would be very successful.

This game was based on the popular Magicland Dizzy, but with the ability to play as Dizzy or Daisy or both! When you played as both characters, you would control one and when you died, the magical Cheshire cat would come and take your inventory and transfer it to the other character. We had to be very careful with the design to ensure this didn’t end up with situations where you broke the game.

With the difficulties surrounding NES distribution issues, the game was unreleased and forgotten about until we were speaking on stage at Play Blackpool in May ‘15 and showed a map of Wonderland Dizzy. We questioned if it had been published and soon realised it hadn’t been. I, Philip, searched my loft for a final master but instead found the source code. Dizzy fan Lukasz Kur was able to re-compile, tidy up a couple of bits and create a master build.

Around the same time Chris Wilkins of Fusion Retro Books was planning the Kickstarter campaign for the “Let’s Go Dizzy” book and suggested adding a physical NES cartridge to available perks and looked into having these made. We limited this to just 150 Cartridges which makes them very rare and collectable. All royalties were donated to SpecialEffect.

Original documents

Archived Wonderland Dizzy document (PDF)

Sources

• Wikipedia