LizardCube reverse engineered the original Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap to help create the remake

Back in June, it was revealed that Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap was being remade by the devs at LizardCube. The remake is set to be released on PC and consoles, featuring beautifully hand-drawn graphics and re-imagined soundtrack.

LizardCube’s Omar, who is the technical director and programmer for the remake, posted a blog that described the process of being faithful to the original Wonder Boy game. According to Omar, “one of the primary goals we set for ourselves was to make a game that is faithful and respectful to the original in terms of gameplay.” In order to accomplish this, the team reverse-engineered the Master System version of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap to understand the game mechanics.

They studied the code for months, learning the ins and outs of how the game works. While LizardCube does want to be faithful to the original, it won’t be a carbon-copy remake.

“With all things adding up, this allowed us to start developing a new game with a good level of understanding in regards to how the original worked. Of course, we will stray away from the original! We want the new physics to be smoother, as the original only ran at 30 FPS. For the new version we are doubling that. We want to go from 4:3 ratio to widescreen. Armed with that knowledge we can be certain that we won’t overlook details from the original. So when we make other changes and additions to the game, we will make them intentionally and not accidentally.“