Apart from the odd clip in a few of the Commodore magazines, nothing was much seen or heard about this little game. It wasn’t until Commodore Format ran a feature, Where are they now, when they mentioned Ubik (David Korn) and a few of his games.
All Terrain Gardener was one of these, and again thoughts were about the existence of the game. The game involves is to save a garden of flowers from a flood of water which gradually increases, by digging up the flowers and putting them to safety. Featuring cool overlaid sprites and graphics by Paul Docherty (Dokk), and a good rendition of “Flight Of The Bumblebee” by Tonal Teapot, the game had the makings of a winner.
ATG was the last game that Ubik wrote on the C64. The game was fully completed, but unfortunately at the time of completion, British Telecom who owned Firebird, decided that Firebird was not making enough money and sold everything off to MicroProse. Therefore ATG remained unpublished.
Ubik told Commodore Zone in an interview that Gary Liddon badgered him to dust the game down and tidy it up, which they did. Removing bugs, glitches and tweaking the game, Ubik offered it to Codemasters, whom never replied. And so ATG gathered dust once more.
There was talk of the game being converted to the Colour Gameboy, from Gary Liddon, but this would never materialize in the end.
Around 1999/2000 time, Commodore Zone magazine got in contact with Ubik for an interview, where Ubik then gave a full copy of ATG for their covermount, along with permission to use his other programs.
A neat little game that eventually saw release.
Contributions: Ubik, Dokk and Commodore Zone, Gary Liddon
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Game_ATG.zip (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 20/07/17 – Added alternative name thanks to Gary Liddon.
- 28/09/14 – Added CZ portion of an interview with Ubik, talking about ATG.
Ha! I don’t remember any of that :D
I do remember that the game was originally called Sue’s Garden but Firebird marketing outright rejected it just before signing the contract because it didn’t sound exciting enough. Colin (firebird’s dev guy) resubmitted it as All Terrain Gardener and it went through though was sadly canned before completion.
rubbishy bit of trivia – I wrote the sprite editor used to make the dancing flower sprites
It might also have been because we had at least two Sue’s working for TelecomSoft at the time! ;-)