The Oliver twins wanted a character with a face, and on an 8-bit computer that is hard to do with a small sprite. “We felt the best way to achieve this was to make his head as big as possible,” Philip Oliver told Retro Gamer, “so we ended up making him into an egg shape. It was also easy to draw.” The egg was Dizzy. His first game, Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, cost £1.99 on the Code Masters label in 1987. It sold no better than an average Code Masters game at first, but it kept on selling, and by the early 1990s Dizzy had his own family, a string of sequels and spin-offs, and a cartridge on the NES in America.
The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure
In the first game Dizzy has to brew a potion to defeat the Evil Wizard Zaks. He explores a haunted forest, mineshafts, crystal cliffs and a castle, picking up objects and working out where each one is needed: a crowbar opens a trapdoor, an oilcan gets a stuck minecart moving, and the potion’s ingredients go into a cauldron. Bats, spiders, apples dropping from trees and bridges that crumble underfoot cost him lives. Retro Gamer dated the release to September 1987. ACE reviewed it in its first issue, in October 1987, and listed Spectrum and Amstrad CPC cassettes, both at £1.99 and both already out.
What the press made of it
CRASH reviewed the Spectrum version in November 1987 and gave it 78%. Its three reviewers split. One compared it with Firebird’s Spiky Harold, “which had a hedgehog instead of an egg”, and could not find “ANYTHING nasty to say”. Another was won over against his own taste: “Dizzy may be a little too cute and cuddly for my liking, but there’s a great game hidden within those small and furry folds.” He also noticed Code Masters’ habit of praising itself: the inlay “goes a little overboard — the word ‘brilliant’ appears four times.” The third thought the graphics were “the sort of game that provokes your mum to say ‘Aw, isn’t that sweet’”.
Sinclair User reviewed it in December 1987 and took issue with the subtitle. The game had been described as “The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure”, the reviewer wrote. “This is almost true. It should have been ‘The Ultimate Budget Cartoon Adventure’.” It was still “One of the Oliver Twins’ best”. ZZAP!64 reviewed a Commodore 64 version in its budget pages in September 1988, and was cooler: if this style of game was your cup of tea, “then go ahead”, but it was not the reviewer’s.
The series
The sales, Retro Gamer said, were average but steady, and the Darlings and the twins decided on a sequel. They gave it its own name, Treasure Island Dizzy (1988), rather than calling it Dizzy 2. It outsold the first game. In February 1992 the twins told CRASH it had been in the charts for 120 weeks and had sold more than 250,000 copies. Fantasy World Dizzy (1989) introduced the Yolkfolk, Dizzy’s friends and family, from Denzil and Dylan to Dozy and Grand Dizzy, with his girlfriend Daisy to rescue. Andrew Oliver called it their favourite. “We completed it in just one month,” he told Retro Gamer, and it was “the last Dizzy game done by just the two of us”. He also said it sold more than any other Dizzy game.
Big Red Software wrote the next adventures, starting with Magicland Dizzy (1990), followed by Spellbound Dizzy and Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk (both 1991). Spellbound Dizzy was big enough that, Retro Gamer said, Code Masters ran four separate telephone helplines for it. Prince of the Yolkfolk first appeared only on a compilation, Dizzy’s Excellent Adventures. The last adventure of the period, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy (1992), was the first to leave the budget range and sell at full price.
Between the adventures came arcade spin-offs. The first, Fast Food (1989), is a maze game in which Dizzy eats burgers and avoids ghosts; Retro Gamer said it was going to be called Happy Eater, after the roadside restaurant chain, until a sponsorship deal fell through. Kwik Snax, Bubble Dizzy, Dizzy Panic and Dizzy Down the Rapids followed. In October 1990 the Virgin Megastore budget chart printed in Your Sinclair had Quattro Adventure, a four-game Code Masters compilation led by Dizzy, at number one and Treasure Island Dizzy at number six.
Dizzy in America
Code Masters wanted a share of the NES market without Nintendo’s licence, and Dizzy went with it. Edge’s 2004 history of Micro Machines describes the first step. In April 1989 Andrew Graham, a computer science student at the University of Strathclyde, converted Treasure Island Dizzy to the NES on a home-made development system that linked a PC, a Commodore 64 and “a box full of wires and electronics” to a consumer NES. That conversion was only released years later, as one of the games on the Quattro Adventure cartridge.
The twins meanwhile wrote The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, which Graham called “probably the biggest and best of their Dizzy games”. It was among Code Masters’ first NES releases in 1991, sold in North America by the Canadian company Camerica. Camerica’s advertisement in Game Informer in January 1992 called it “an exceptional role playing cartoon adventure featuring Britain’s best selling video game character”, with “over 100 hours of dynamic game play”, and added that it was “not designed, manufactured, distributed or endorsed by Nintendo of America”. The game later appeared, as Fantastic Dizzy on some formats, on the Mega Drive, Master System, Game Gear, Amiga, Atari ST and PC. Kwik Snax became Go! Dizzy Go! on the NES and Game Gear in 1993.
Retro Gamer reported that Code Masters discussed a Dizzy cartoon series with Hanna-Barbera in 1992, but the American studio did not think the character was well enough known outside Britain.
Revivals
Dizzy went quiet after the early 1990s. In December 2011 Codemasters published a high-definition remake of Prince of the Yolkfolk for iOS and Android, developed by DNA Interactive with Paul Ranson, who had directed the original. “It always astounds us what a loyal fan base Dizzy still has,” Philip Oliver said when it was announced.
In late 2012 the twins launched Dizzy Returns on Kickstarter, asking for £350,000. In December, with just over £23,000 pledged, they conceded it would not reach its target: “in order to meet that we’d need over £40,000 pledged every day, and realistically that’s not going to happen.”
Then a forgotten game came out of Philip Oliver’s loft. Looking for Dizzy props for an event, he found a box holding the source code and graphics of Wonderland Dizzy, an NES adventure written in 1993 that Codemasters had not published. The finished program was missing, so a Polish fan, Lukasz Kur, rebuilt a working ROM from the source, fixed bugs and added a mode with infinite lives. The twins released it free to play in a web browser in October 2015, 22 years after it was written.
Sources
- ACE issue 1, October 1987: Dizzy review (Code Masters; ACE rating 788; Spectrum and Amstrad, £1.99, out now).
- CRASH issue 46, November 1987, p. 134: Dizzy review; tips for the first game in the same issue (the crowbar, the trapdoor, the wizard Zaks).
- Sinclair User issue 69, December 1987: Dizzy review (Code Masters, the Oliver twins, £1.99, 48K/128K; the minecart and the oilcan).
- CRASH issue 48, Christmas Special 1987: index of reviews (Dizzy 78%).
- ZZAP!64 issue 41, September 1988, p. 107: Dizzy budget review (Commodore 64).
- Your Sinclair issue 58, October 1990: Virgin Megastore budget chart.
- Game Informer issue 3, January 1992: Camerica advertisement for The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy.
- CRASH issue 96, February 1992: interview with the Oliver twins (Treasure Island Dizzy’s 120 weeks and 250,000 copies).
- Retro Gamer issue 2, 2004: Dizzy feature by David Crookes (the egg shape; the September 1987 release; sales of the first two games; Fantasy World Dizzy; Big Red Software; Spellbound Dizzy’s helplines; Fast Food and Happy Eater; the spin-offs and formats; Crystal Kingdom Dizzy at full price; Hanna-Barbera).
- Edge issue 136, May 2004, pp. 114–117: “The making of… Micro Machines” (Andrew Graham’s NES Treasure Island Dizzy; The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy among Code Masters’ first NES games).
- MCV, “New Dizzy title is iOS remake of Prince of Yolkfolk”, 23 November 2011 (web, secondary). https://mcvuk.com/business-news/mobile/new-dizzy-title-is-ios-remake-of-prince-of-yolkfolk/
- Nintendo Life, “Oliver Twins admit Dizzy Returns Kickstarter has failed”, 14 December 2012 (web, secondary). https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/12/oliver_twins_admit_dizzy_returns_kickstarter_has_failed
- Matt Purslow, “Oliver Twins have released Wonderland Dizzy, a game they forgot about for 22 years”, PCGamesN, 26 October 2015 (web, secondary). https://www.pcgamesn.com/oliver-twins-have-released-wonderland-dizzy-a-game-they-forgot-about-for-22-years