Retro platformer series Dizzy is back for a new game from its original creators, who are really happy for you to know it's made with AI

A great fall

For British people who were actively playing games in the late 80s and/or retro enthusiasts looking back at that period of the industry, the name Dizzy might ring a bell (it doesn’t for me, but what can I tell you, I’m 24). A prolific platformer series starring a bipedal egg, it spanned formats from the ZX Spectrum to the NES and Game Gear, and managed sixteen(!?) releases between 1987 and 1992 - before slowing significantly past the millenium. Still, that hasn’t stopped its creators, the Oliver Twins, from trying to bring it back in the current era, and so came the announcement of another new Dizzy game during their talk at last weekend’s Play Expo in Blackpool.

Among many other exhibitions and talks on retro games, twins Phillip and Andrew delivered a talk on each of their upcoming projects: Journey to the Emerald City for Phillip, and a new Dizzy entry for Andrew, respectively (thanks, Time Extension!) This new attempt will mostly be a remake of 1989's Treasure Island Dizzy, scrambling up the ZX Spectrum and NES versions into one game, as well as creating a new Mega Drive version and a completely new 'Ultra' version with modern visuals. Apparently, the secret sauce for getting this ambitious Dizzy project to become a reality (as well as Emerald City, by extension) is to happily use generative AI to take all the hard work out of this pesky "making a game" business.

Time Extension’s John Szczepaniak asked the twins outright how they felt about its use, to which Phillip Oliver replied: "I’m sorry, but as an experiment, to create Emerald City, and all of the art that went into this, it would have been an over-a-year project with a couple of artists, probably a hundred thousand pounds, all said and done when you're looking at all the costs." Now, a hundred thousand pounds is a lot for an independent outfit, but that’s also just how game development, or making anything at all, goes: you spend money making it, you hire people to make it, and you hope you can make that money back. If you care about what you’re making, though, the ROI isn’t the only thing that matters.

But oh, my mistake. Phillip went on to clarify that the twins are just "humble little guys just making Dizzy games", with Andrew later chipping on to say "Somebody came up to me yesterday at the signing table and they basically said, it allows indies to compete on a level with the production quality that these massive studios with really good financing can afford, it gives them an opportunity. The door is opened to actually be able to compete on a quality level, for visuals and everything else. So they said it's really good for indies, and I have to say yes to that."

So that settles it. The use of genAI tools that scrape the entire internet and steal millions of artists’ work for the sake of outputting some awful-looking and blatant slop is justified by them just being "humble little guys". After all, everyone knows it’s impossible for two, or even one, person to make a game on their own without using The Infinite Theft Machine That Kills The Planet. No indie developers have ever done that before, come on now. These are just humble little guys, you can’t be mad at them!