Rick Dangerous was Core Design's debut title — the studio founded in 1988 by Simon Phipps and his team — released in 1989 under MicroProse's Firebird and Microplay labels. The premise is a direct parody of Indiana Jones-style adventure cinema: in 1945, British agent Rick Dangerous crash-lands his plane in the Amazon jungle while searching for the lost Goolu tribe, and has to escape traps — darts, pits, falling boulders — through entire stretches of ruins. Phipps handled the programming and sprites for the 16-bit versions, with artist Terry Lloyd covering the rest of the visuals. The Atari ST version scored 88% from The One magazine and 87% from Computer and Video Games. What defined the game, for better and worse, was its trial-and-error design: every trap kills in a single hit, forcing players to memorize the whole level through repeated deaths — a formula that became its trademark and, in a way, foreshadowed Core Design's obsession with meticulous level design that would later carry through to Tomb Raider.
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