I remember Dragon’s Kingdom very well – sadly for the wrong reasons though, but it was in Commodore Format (Around issue 11/12) where the game got quite a panning by the reviewers for being a poor Ghost n Goblins clone. After checking things out many years later, it seems CF were overharsh about the game – certainly it was very much inspired by Ghosts n Goblins (Well, almost the same in places ;-) ) it was quite a good game (Just a little hard – which was another reason the reviewers hated it sadly).
Well, the developer Alberto Frabetti later decided to improve things by developing a sequel in around 1992. When interviewed back in 2005, he had the following to say when questioned…
Question: "Did you work on other projects that didn’t see the light of the day?"
Alberto: "Whilst working on DK1, I developed a language called "MONSTER LANGUAGE" which was able to create and manage all sorts of animations of enemy monsters.
On DK2 I developed "MONSTER LANGUAGE 2" a truely kick ass package which able to manage every possible situation of the monsters used on the best coin-op of that time. Really complex animations built up using 8-sprites, etc.
DK2 would have been the best platform ever, enemiess and levels at the same quality of a coin-op.Unfortunately it didn’t see the light of day due to a lot of problems, a true pity."
When Alberto was questioned about whether anything had survived of the game, we were given bad news that sadly it hadn’t and that it had been lost in the midsts of time. There is always a remote possibility that something could show up in the future. Alberto may not want anything to sneak out – so we’ll just have to wait and see!
One thing we know is that the sequel could well have been a Ghouls n Ghosts clone, what with Alberto’s love affair with the Ghost n Goblins theme in his games. His other game Varidan was another clone.
More soon on this one we hope…
Contributions: Roberto
