Older media is very much in vogue right now. A lot of things are being revived, reworked or otherwise rebooted in some way, with varying levels of success and popularity. This situation is somewhat unique though – a game developed for the NES that was never released until its makers re-discovered it in their attic.

The 90s saw a lot of platformers made, one being the Dizzy series from the Oliver Twins which was quite popular. One such game was an NES game called Wonderland Dizzy, which due to a collapsing relationship with publisher Codemasters never made it to release and ended up in Philip Oliver’s attic.

Fast-forward 22 years and Philip Oliver found himself looking for some Dizzy props for an event, and ended up re-discovering the Dizzy game that never made it to shelves. With some reworking the Oliver Twins have managed to release the game now as a free browser game.

The filebox that contained the code did not contain the finished game, but did contain all the source code and graphics and with the help of Andrew Joseph, owner of Dizzy fan side Yolkfolk.com, and Lukasz Kur, a fan from Poland a new finished game was produced. Kur managed to put together a playable ROM image of the game with tweaks to get rid of some bugs, add extra language options and a ‘Fun Mode’ with infinite lives.

Around the time Wonderland Dizzy was made, the Oliver Twins made a lot of games for various different platforms that existed at the time. As well their publisher at the time Codemasters was not prepared to publish the game which led to a split between the companies that saw Wonderland Dizzy’s finished file lost and forgotten about until now.

Fortunately the two groups are still on good enough terms now that Codemasters has allowed the twins to release this forgotten game for free to play.

If you enjoy Dizzy back in the 90s, you can give Wonderland Dizzy a shot here.