The Oliver Twins are working on new Dizzy games ahead of the character’s 40th anniversary in 2027. Philip Oliver and Andrew Oliver announced the plans at PLAY Expo Blackpool. No game title, platform or release date has been confirmed.
Philip and Andrew have reached an agreement with Dizzy’s shared rights holders to develop new material. They are now exploring how the character should look and play almost four decades after his first appearance.
The announcement follows years of questions about whether Dizzy could return. Our Dizzy retrospective with Philip Oliver traced the character’s origins, changing formats and previous revival attempts. It also showed how exploration, characters and object-based puzzles kept reappearing even as the technology around the series changed.
Andrew said modern technology creates possibilities the brothers could not have imagined when they made the original games. Their starting point remains much simpler: memorable characters, puzzles, surprising places and a sense of fun. The task now is working out how those ingredients fit a new Dizzy adventure.
The question is what Dizzy becomes now
The original Dizzy arrived in 1987 on the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. Its puzzles gave collected objects a purpose beyond scoring points, since players carried them until they found the person, place or problem that needed them. Exploration worked because learning the world was part of solving it.
That connection gives the revival a more useful question than whether Dizzy gets smoother animation or more detailed scenery. A new visual style could change almost everything on screen without explaining how the adventure itself works. Characters, routes, locked areas and apparently useless objects are where a new game could prove it understands the old ones.
Previous revival attempts show how differently that problem can be approached. Dizzy Returns proposed a substantially modernised version in 2012 but failed to reach its Kickstarter target. Wonderful Dizzy later returned to the ZX Spectrum and a structure much closer to the classic adventures.
Wonderful Dizzy was released for the ZX Spectrum on 18th December 2020. Philip and Andrew designed its adventure around The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, giving familiar Dizzy mechanics a new setting rather than rebuilding the series around newer hardware.
Philip made a similar point during our retrospective. Players did not need Dizzy transformed beyond recognition simply because technology had moved on. A strong adventure still depended on giving them a world worth understanding and problems worth solving.
The existing Dizzy community will be part of the discussion as development progresses. Philip and Andrew plan to share ideas and visual approaches over the coming months, allowing long-term players to respond while those plans are still being explored. That consultation does not mean any particular design, platform or feature has been decided.
The 40th anniversary gives the brothers an obvious reason to revisit a character that became closely associated with British home computing. Dizzy appeared across machines including the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64, while later games experimented with different formats and audiences. The new projects now have to decide which parts of that history belong at the centre rather than treating every old feature as compulsory.
Philip and Andrew are also running a separate Kickstarter for Journey to the Emerald City. The screen-free physical adventure combines an illustrated story with cards, puzzles and other components, and it is not one of the newly announced Dizzy games. Its Kickstarter runs until 20th October 2026.
Fans can sign up for Dizzy development updates or visit the separate Journey to the Emerald City Kickstarter.
