Treasure Island Dizzy

About Treasure Island Dizzy

Treasure Island Dizzy (1989) is the Oliver Twins' second Dizzy game, a notoriously hard inventory puzzle adventure in which the egg hero escapes a desert island with just one life.

Treasure Island Dizzy in Depth

Dizzy is stranded and must solve a series of puzzles to obtain a boat and return to his friends and family, the Yolkfolk, journeying through haunted mines, tree villages and the sea bed. Compared with the first game it has a new inventory system and improved animations, fewer enemies and a stronger focus on inventory-based problem solving. A subquest, which turns out to be essential, asks Dizzy to collect thirty gold coins, a feature repeated in many sequels: on escaping the last island, the Shopkeeper appears and tells him he cannot leave without them, and since many coins are hidden behind scenery, this second task proved harder than the main game.

Critics consider it one of the hardest Dizzy games. There is no energy bar, and Dizzy has only one life, compared with five in the first game and three in Fantasy World Dizzy and most later titles. Uniquely, the player cannot choose which item to use: Dizzy simply drops whatever is at the top of his inventory, so if he is underwater with the snorkel at the top, picking up something else makes him drop it and drown instantly. It therefore demands more foresight and planning than any other game in the series. Commodore Format printed a "complete" solution and map which, like Codemasters' premium-rate hint line, left out the hidden coins.

Making Treasure Island Dizzy

The Oliver Twins developed it and Codemasters published it in 1989 for the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum, following it with Commodore 64, NES, Amiga, Atari ST and Atari Jaguar ports. It was a long-running budget hit and the sequel to Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, introducing the inventory puzzles and coin hunts that later Dizzy games built on. Codemasters released a Windows version on its website in 2004, actually the Commodore 64 version bundled with an emulator, and the NES version returned on the Evercade's Oliver Twins Collection in 2020.