MAGICLAND DIZZY

THERE WASN'T ENOUGH TIME FOR THE ORIGINAL CREATORS OF THE DIZZY SERIES TO HAVE A FOURTH CRACK AT PRODUCING A NEW DIZZY ADVENTURE FOR HOME COMPUTERS. BUT WITH THE BATON PASSED TO A NEW DEVELOPMENT TEAM, ANOTHER CRACKING QUEST EMERGED

- WORDS BY DAVID CROOKES

The fourth iteration of Dizzy was, by and large, the same as the previous three.

But Codemasters' popular series of graphic adventures, which spawned many an 'egg-cellent' pun in the computing press, was also a tad different.

Those first three games - Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, Treasure Island Dizzy and Fantasy World Dizzy - had been written by Philip and Andrew Oliver, aka the Oliver twins. But since the brothers were looking to crack the fast-growing console market with the NES-lead adventure/platformer, Fantastic Dizzy, they had no choice but to pass on the design baton to someone else. "The 8-bit Spectrum and Amstrad markets were clearly fading by 1990, with players moving to the Atari ST and Amiga and we felt the real future was in the consoles, especially in America with the NES."

Although Philip and Andrew sketched out the design basics for what would become Magicland Dizzy, Neal Vincent was tasked with fleshing it out. Neal was Codemasters' stock control assistant working at the Lower Farm House offices in Southam and he volunteered to help when the Codies' bosses put out a call for assistance with the project. He'd never worked on a game before and he hadn't even played a previous Dizzy game so he started familiarising himself with the titles before coming up with ideas to take the game forward.

Philip can't, with any great certainty, say who did the bulk of the design work. "That makes it difficult to say where Neal's work began and ours ended. Either we created them ourselves or Neal did such a good job of imitating our style that they looked just like ours - and I suspect it was the latter."