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Wonderland Dizzy was developed by the famous Oliver Twins. It was supposed to be released for the Aladdin Deck Enhancer device which was developed by
Codemasters and supposed to be released in the US. The Aladdin Deck Enhancer was manufactured in a somewhat large quantity and was ready to ship to retailers
when Camerica, the distributor, went out of business.
Philip Oliver says about Wonderland Dizzy
It was a new adventure but "was inspired by" ideas we'd done on the Atari ST/Amiga. The big thing about it was that a
Cheshire cat kept appearing and disappearing - and gave you clues. etc. Obviously there were lots of other "Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the looking
glass" references.
I don't think the game ever was exposed in an official statement of any sort, but the title was mentioned on the Oliver Twins own website as one of their
unreleased Nintendo games, although Wonderland Dizzy is said to be near complete, if not complete. I spoke with the Oliver Twins about the game a few years ago
and they actually went looking for the existing prototype but it was sadly no where to be found.
The Oliver Twins wrote on the following about the game on their website
We were bearing the costs of producing games but as they were not released we had no
income to support development. We had to find a solution. The Sega Master System was very similar to the NES in its ability and the recently released Game Gear
was just a handheld Master System we decided to convert Dizzy the Adventurer, Dreamworld Pogie, Go! Dizzy Go! and Wonderland Dizzy. Here were some potential
releases and we could salvage some of the work we had already done.
We felt we had no choice and started converting the games. During production our relationship with Codemasters took a downturn. We decided to cancel Dreamworld
Pogie fairly quickly as some of the staff left us and we didn't have the staff left to convert all of them. A few months into the work Codemasters’ marketing
department told us that it was not prepared to release the games separately at full price so we would have to turn them into one compilation. Powerless to do
anything about this we called the compilation The Excellent Dizzy Collection and it should have contained Dizzy the Adventurer, Go! Dizzy Go! and
Wonderland Dizzy.
A month or so into development we were told that the compilation could not contain two adventure games. So as the pressure was on we decided to convert the
aptly named Panic Dizzy as it was the simplest Dizzy game written and would complement the other two games well.
I'm fairly sure that the world lost a very good and playable game and I do hope that the NES version does turn up eventually.
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