Trivia / Magician Lord

• Troubled Production: The development was hectic, as detailled in a video by the French youtube show Retro Games Test. As Magician Lord alongside the Neo Geo hardware itself, features were constantly in flux and the developers wound up having to scale down their ambitious plans for dozens of transformations and advanced graphical effects due to the pressure to release the game alongside the system's launch and hardware features like zoom and rotation being cut to save costs. Another issue was when the game was location-tested and ADK found out that the game was far too easy, and thus unprofitable as an arcade game, as the large maze-like levels and generous health allotement meants players were able to survive for much longer than the average arcade game. As this was a few weeks before release, the developers responded by cutting the player's lifebar by half and hazphardedly removing large chunks of the levels (the last-minute nature of the change is exemplified by the fact, that using a double jump exploits, players can go out of bound in the first level and find unused graphics for the original "large" version of the level and stand on invisible platforms that had their graphics removed but not the collision detection). This change ended up working perhaps a little too well, as the final release is a shining example of Nintendo Hard and an ADK employee was only able to one-credit it more than a year after release. In the end, Magician Lord flopped in the arcades but saw better sales on the home console and became something of a Cult Classic among early adopters of the Neo Geo.
• What Could Have Been: Apparently SNK was working on a portable sequel to the game, for Neo Geo Pocket, in the late Nineties. According to this French article, it was being developed by ADK and was in the alpha stage when ADK and SNK went bankrupt. Elta could turn into several new forms and the game seemed more of a Metroidvania, but we'll never know for sure.