A couple of days ago, the Oliver Twins, Philip and Andrew, announced the release of a new Dizzy game, Wonderland Dizzy.
The new installment to the retro game franchise was announced on Oct. 24 by the Oliver Twins, original developers of the Dizzy game series, during an event at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge that also marked the launch of their Kickstarter campaign for a book titled "The Story of the Oliver Twins."
Wonderland Dizzy was meant to debut in the early 90s for the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), after 1992's Crystal Kingdom Dizzy. However, the game series publisher, Codemasters, canceled its scheduled release, thus adding to the reasons of the fallout with the Oliver Twins.
As the twin explained on their "Wonderland Dizzy Rediscovered" video, the game disk laid inside a box of documents somewhere in Philip Oliver's loft, forgotten for 22 years until their presentation at Play Blackpool last May 2015. After the presentation, both began looking for the 256 KB disk — or diskette, depending on who you ask — that contained the game. Two decades later and everything is still intact; the source code is still there and undamaged.
They even teased its release on a Twitter post.
Just wondering... would people like a new Dizzy game by The Oliver Twins? pic.twitter.com/yOMjsa6lIr
— The Oliver Twins (@TheOliverTwins) September 16, 2015
Contents of the disk were then forwarded to Lukasz Kur, a Dizzy game fan who is based in Poland. Kur compiled a ROM using the disk's content. The twins also disclosed that they had Kur put in a "fun" mode where players will have unlimited lives instead of just getting limited to three. Moreover, aside from English, several language packs were also added: Polish, Spanish, French, Portuguese and German.
Andrew Joseph of Yolkfolk.com, who was the person that introduced Lukasz to the brothers, then managed to make it work with a browser. Lo and behold, here we are today with a new free-to-play Dizzy game.
So how do developers forget about a game they made?
"During the space of '84 to '93 we produced 50 games," Philip Oliver told Euro Gamer. That's not counting different platforms. "If you actually multiply by platforms there's an average of two or three that we personally produced."
Oliver also adds that the chances for a new Dizzy game to be released after Wonderland Dizzy is "slim." The twins are currently occupied and are working on SkySaga.
For those who want to try and complete Wonderland Dizzy, just click on the link. Below is the game's trailer.
