Rick Dangerous was an original platform game that spoofed the Indiana Jones genre and was the first game to be developed by the newly formed Core Design. 

Rick emerged when Terry Lloyd (my co-artist on the project) and I were asked one afternoon to come up with original game ideas for the newly formed company. We sat down writing a list of game genres and themes discounting those that had been done recently. After about an hour we saw that the only thing that remained on our list was the one that read 'Indiana Jones/adventurer' and the more we talked about it the more we realised how few games had explored the theme let alone done it well. Certainly for us, no one had ever really done an Indiana Jones-style game that got to the heart of what made movies so cool. The arcade conversions based on the films had come and gone, but nothing for us had ever captured the feeling of those first five minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the hero leaping pits, dodging poison darts and being pursued by giant balls of rock. 

So, on 3 bits of A3 paper we wrote up the game design that went something like this: 

"Rick Dangerous! Vertically scrolling climber game, basically climbing down for the majority of the time. Each level linked with a cartoon sequence to tie story together.
The game follows the adventures of Rick Dangerous (a hero) through numerous Indy Jones style predicaments with numerous bad guys pursuing him (soldiers, Casablanca/Maltese Falcon-type enemies). By having the enemies chasing Rick it is hoped that a more natural feel will be given to the game, with the need for having abstract Jet Set Willy- type floating heads following a constant movement pattern being reduced. Rick may stop his pursuers by many devious means, fundamentally by activating traps around the level using his weapons.
He is equipped with:
A Gun! (This has limited bullets)
…A Big Stick
…And Some Dynamite (Like bullets, a limited quantity) (A very big stick of dynamite)" 

And so on… 

So, armed with that brief we managed to convince enough people to go for it and set about putting together what has turned out to be a surprisingly memorable title for many people.

Indeed, some 20 years after it was created, Rick is still remembered fondly by many and is being kept alive by a number of retro-gaming websites. (How cool is that???) The most interesting that I have found so far are: 

In 2006, I picked up my pen and for the first time in 17 years drew this version of Rick for Pascal and the guys at the Spoutnick Team to say thanks for their work in keeping Rick alive on the Gameboy Advance:

Fans of Rick might like to try making one of the free Paper Toys I've created.  Grab your scissors, tape and head over to the Downloads page.  Have fun!

WHO HAS THE RIGHTS TO RICK NOW?

Since putting together this site I've had many queries from Rick fans who have made their own version of Rick for a particular format, asking me if I know who owns the rights to Rick and who they ought to approach in order to get their game published. Well, I'm sorry to say that I don't exactly know who owns the rights to Rick - I would suspect it is Eidos, the publisher who originally bought Core Design many years ago, but that's only my guess.

To the best of my knowledge no one has ever managed to track down who actually has the rights, or if they did, they've had no further success. If only because, to date, we've never seen an officially published version of Rick since the sequel Rick Dangerous 2.