Wonderful Dizzy arrived in December 2020 as something many of us had long since stopped expecting: a completely new adventure designed by the Oliver Twins for the ZX Spectrum. Better still, it was not a modern game dressed up to resemble an old Spectrum release. This was built for the 128K machine itself.
Dizzy hardly needs an introduction if you grew up around British home computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Philip Oliver and Andrew Oliver’s egg-shaped hero became one of the defining characters of the era, spawning a whole Yolkfolk universe and appearing across machines including the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga, as well as consoles such as the NES.
For a while, though, the chances of a substantial new official Dizzy adventure looked slim. A 2012 Kickstarter for Dizzy Returns failed to reach its funding target, leaving another modern comeback on the shelf.
A Spectrum Next stretch goal that became a proper Spectrum game
The route to Wonderful Dizzy began with the original ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter in 2017. Philip and Andrew promised to design a new Dizzy adventure if a stretch goal was reached, and when the campaign sailed past it, the Yolkfolk suddenly had another appointment with the Spectrum.
The interesting twist is that the finished game was not designed exclusively around the Next’s expanded hardware. Instead, Wonderful Dizzy was built for a standard 128K ZX Spectrum, which means it can run on original hardware as well as the ZX Spectrum Next and the usual selection of emulators.
A dedicated ZX Spectrum Next version was talked about at the time, with the idea of making fuller use of the newer machine’s expanded capabilities. That version never arrived, so the 128K release remains the finished version of Wonderful Dizzy. Fortunately, it hardly feels like a consolation prize because this is still a superb Dizzy game in its own right.
The development team was already a good fit. Evgeniy Barskiy handled programming, with graphics from Dmitri Ponomarjov, Alexander Filyanov, Oleg Origin, Marco Antonio Del Campo and Jarrod Bentley, and music and effects by Sergey Kosov. Members of the team had previously remade Crystal Kingdom Dizzy, rebuilding the Spectrum game and improving its presentation and playability.
Philip and Andrew designed the new adventure themselves, making this the first completely new Dizzy adventure they had designed in 28 years. The whole project was created without money changing hands and released free of charge.
The inspiration this time is L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dizzy and Pogie are whisked away by a cyclone, their house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East, Pogie is kidnapped by the understandably annoyed Wicked Witch of the West, and Dizzy sets off towards the Emerald City looking for both his friend and a way home.
The rest of the Yolkfolk are worked into familiar Oz roles, while Pogie takes the Toto position. It is exactly the sort of cheerful collision of ideas that suits a series in which an egg with boxing gloves regularly solved international crises by carrying around three apparently unrelated household objects.
Mechanically, this remains classic Dizzy. You explore, talk to characters, collect objects, work out where those objects are needed and gradually open up more of the map. Inventory juggling is still part of the deal, so remembering where you dumped something half an hour earlier remains an unofficial additional puzzle.
There are some smart changes to the formula. The world is not limited to moving left and right, with paths leading into and out of the screen and buildings opening into further areas. That gives the map more depth than the older adventures while keeping the individual screen structure immediately familiar.
Dizzy also starts with three lives, making this considerably less cruel than something like Treasure Island Dizzy and its infamous single-life approach. The controls are responsive enough that mistakes tend to feel like your mistakes rather than the game quietly deciding an egg should die because one pixel touched the wrong thing.
The graphics deserve special mention because this genuinely looks superb for a 128K Spectrum game. Screens are packed with colour and detail without pretending the hardware is something it is not, and even familiar Spectrum limitations become part of the presentation rather than something the developers seem embarrassed by.
There is a lot here too. The adventure moves from Munchkin Village through roads, woods, caves, castles, palaces and the Emerald City, with plenty of verticality alongside the wider map. Coins provide another reason to poke around corners, particularly when you reach the point where you know there is one somewhere and have absolutely no idea which screen you failed to inspect properly.
Wonderful Dizzy Review
Wonderful Dizzy works because it understands that bringing Dizzy back did not require reinventing him. The object puzzles, somersaulting movement, Yolkfolk humour and slightly absurd world all feel immediately familiar, while the larger map, improved controls and richer presentation smooth away some of the rougher edges of the older games. The absence of that once-planned Next-specific version is a shame, but the 128K game never feels like a lesser substitute.
More than anything, it is difficult not to admire what the team squeezed from a 128K Spectrum. This could easily have become a nostalgia exercise whose appeal ended with recognising the character, but it stands comfortably as a good Spectrum adventure in its own right. The extra horsepower of the Next might have been interesting, but Wonderful Dizzy already gives the old machine a comeback worthy of the character.
Wonderful Dizzy was released on 18th December 2020 and remains completely free. You can play it in your browser or download the 128K Spectrum version from the Oliver Twins, while Spectrum Computing has additional release information.
