Rick Dangerous was released in 1989 by Core Design, the Derby studio that would later create Tomb Raider. It is an unabashed Indiana Jones parody: soft hat, pistol, sticks of dynamite, and four settings running from the Amazon jungle to an Egyptian pyramid, a Nazi castle and a missile base. The game appeared on Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and PC.
Its principle comes down to one word: memorisation. Traps are never telegraphed — an arrow shoots out of a wall, a block drops from the ceiling, a guard bursts through a door — and the first encounter is almost always fatal. You progress by dying, taking notes and starting over. This trial-and-error design, very typical of late-1980s European home computer games, earned it a reputation for sadistic difficulty that its fans happily claim as a badge of honour. A sequel, Rick Dangerous 2, followed in 1990.
Recalbox does not replay the original binaries: it uses xrick, a free reimplementation of the Rick Dangerous engine, integrated as a libretro core and distributed under the GPL-3.0 licence. It reads the game data and replays it natively, with a controller and no resolution limit.
| Studio | Core Design |
| Year of release | 1989 |
| Engine | Original engine, reimplemented by xrick |
| Game type | 2D action platformer |
| Port licence | GPL-3.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Rick Dangerous is shipped complete with Recalbox and playable straight away: there is nothing to provide or install. See the Included games page.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro xrick | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
xrick is the only emulator for this system and is therefore used by default on every machine, including the Raspberry Pi Zero 2: the game is extremely light. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled by the core, including region switching (50 / 60 Hz).
Rick Dangerous is a read-only system: the game is shipped complete and its folder is not meant to be modified.
/recalbox/share_init/roms/ports/Rick Dangerous/
Supported extensions: .zip .7z
The folder holds the game's data archive, ready to use:
/recalbox/share_init/roms/ports/Rick Dangerous/
└── Rick Dangerous.zip ← around 1.4 MB: graphics, levels and sounds
Unlike Prince of Persia or Theme Hospital, this .zip is not an empty file: it really does contain the data xrick reads, and the game starts with no setup at all.
This system does not read
/recalbox/share/roms/. Dropping files into/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Rick Dangerous/has no effect: they will not appear in the game list.