All Terrain Gardener - Memories

This C64 title was a mad platform caper where you played a gardener who had to dash around screens, rescuing plants and flowers before they drowned. A swarm of killer bees was going to thwart you (amongst other things), and all you had to protect yourself was a trowel.

David 'Ubik' Korn had already written a few budget games for Telecomsoft, including two great drum kit synthesiser titles, Micro Rhythm and Micro Rhythm +, as well as a conversion of Thrust II and Arcade Classics, all for the Commodore 64.

All Terrain Gardener (shortened to the acronym ATG) featured graphics by Paul 'Dokk' Docherty and used some nifty overlaid sprites.

ATG was almost finished (apart from a few bugs and glitches) when BT sold Telecomsoft to MicroProse (UK) Ltd in mid 1989. MicroProse dropped the Silverbird budget label soon afterwards, and so ATG needed a new publisher. Prompted by Gary Liddon (whose own game Tyger! Tyger! also never saw the light of day at Telecomsoft), Dave fixed the bugs, slightly amended the game and tried to raise some interest at Codemasters. Unfortunately, it was not to be, and so the game remained lost until C64 fanzine Commodore Zone interviewed Dave and persuaded him to allow ATG to go on issue 15's cover disk.

The screenshots shown here are from the Commodore Zone release of ATG, which was turned into a single file and compressed for the magazine by editor Jason Kelk, who also wrote one of Silverbird's other lost titles, Protocol.