Whilst we were really pleased with the creativity of the original Dizzy game, it's sales were relatively slow. It did attract an enormous amount of fan mail at Codemasters offices, many of them asking for another Dizzy game. As time went by Dizzy sales didn't drop off as is common with most games and it kept on selling. So finally, over a year since the original Dizzy we thought it was time to produce a sequel. 

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This time Dizzy had to escape from being shipwrecked on a Treasure Island. We felt this evoked a great spirit of adventure and an obvious objective. It also meant we didn’t have to explain why he was on his own!

We introduced a better inventory system so Dizzy could now hold 3 items, even though it was all still on one button. Dizzy was given the ability to swim underwater, provided he kept the snorkel with him whilst doing so. We also introduced the classic treehouse ‘maze’, inspired by the Ewok village in Star Wars.

 

Development started in the last week of September and we were keen to ensure the game made it to the shops in time for the Christmas sales, so we set ourselves the hard deadline of mastering both Amstrad and Spectrum versions by the end of October. During final testing, we realised that if Dizzy dropped the Snorkel underwater, he would repeatedly die losing all his lives. We’d seen this sort of thing in other games and hated it. Anxious that we’d miss Christmas if we started re-designing systems, we took the stupid decision to simply remove the lives, so Dizzy had only 1 life! Whilst it was a decision we regretted, the game was released in mid-November and was a massive success both critically and commercially.

 

Codemasters quickly arranged for the game to be converted to all the other platforms and this set Dizzy on the road to stardom!