Dirk Dashing: spy-comedy platform game

The premise is a straight parody of the spy thriller, and the listing spells it out to a degree that is unusual here. The agent is assigned to recover the seven largest diamonds in the world, stolen by an international jewel thief named Pique Pockette; the trail leads to the Bavarian Alps of southern Germany; and the levels mix jumping with enemy agents, traps, icy hazards and small puzzles. Seven diamonds is a structural fact rather than a decorative one — it tells you the game is built as a chase in named stages rather than as an open run of levels.

The tone is played for laughs rather than tension, which puts it in the tradition of British platform games that treated the genre as a comic form. A pun for a villain and a specified alpine location are the two things a listing includes when the game expects to be taken as a comedy first, and one external trace records what the page did not: a Spanish download portal that deep-linked here lists the game at version 1.1, which is one revision past release.

What makes it worth an entry is the shape of its disappearance. This is not a case of a store closing or a game being delisted from a platform. The publisher ran its own domain, the game had its own domain, and both now resolve in DNS while answering nothing. For a title sold directly rather than through a marketplace, that is terminal: there is no third-party shelf it can still be sitting on.

The two-domain arrangement is worth drawing out, because at the time it looked like prudence. Running the studio on one address and the game on another is what a careful small publisher did: it gave the product its own identity and made it easy to advertise. It also doubled the number of registrations that had to keep being renewed, and when the attention behind them stopped, both stopped together.

Established: the publisher name, the genre, the named antagonist, the seven-diamond premise and the Bavarian setting as the page described them, the version number a portal recorded, and the current unreachability of both domains. Not established: release year, price, or how many entries the series eventually ran to.