Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure 1987 Fast Food 1987
Dizzy’s creators Philip and Andrew
Oliver say the reason their most
famous hero took the form of an egg
with boxing gloves is because they
were looking for a shape that would be
easy to draw and rotate. But drawing
him would turn out to be the only thing
about Dizzy that was easy, as anyone’s
who’s played through one of his
platform adventures can attest.
You see, Dizzy isn’t just his name- it’s also a description of his state
of mind most of the time. Being an
egg, he’s prone to rolling down hills
uncontrollably, which meant you had
to be pixel-perfect with your jumps if
you wanted to avoid overshooting and
drowning him in a pond, or have him
tumble into the jaws of a crocodile.
But despite the frustrations of
controlling such an untameable hero,
the Dizzy games couldn’t help but,
well, dizzy you with the charms of the
inventory-based puzzling that drove
the gameplay. While these puzzles
were a simple case of matching an
item with the obstacle they’d remove,
this would sometimes require a lot of
back-tracking over an ever-expanded
world, plus a little outside-the-box
thinking. (As an example: to get past
that snap-happy croc, you hopped on
with a length of rope and tied it around
his snout. Voilà! Instant platform.)How gaming’s original budget hero took an
expensive toll on the sanity of Speccy owners...
SPOTLIGHT
Creators The Oliver Twins
Publisher Codemasters
Series lifespan 1987 - 2015
Latest release Wonderland Dizzy