Gilbert Goodmate

Whilst adding some new games to the sites, most of which were in development at the end of the 1990's, I came across one called "Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria".

This is a point and click adventure game that I'd not heard of before. So I did some digging around and it doesn't look like it was ever released. However there was a demo for it released on Aminet, which I've now used to get information and screenshots for the site.

You can have a look at the entry here.

The demo only features 2 screens for you to interact with, but it showed lots of promise. The demo can be run from floppy disk. I loaded it in WinUAE via Workbench 3.1 and it ran fine.

This could have been quite a good game. It was destined for CD-Rom and had quite a big plan for the game if you read the demo's documentation and included Amigaguide. Shame.

Looks very nice to me. Sadly such games got never released.

If i remember rightly from reading one of my old magazines it was to be released on the miggy but ended up as a PC release. Here. I do know that the graphics were designed originally on the miggy.

Cheers for that info. I will add that link to the site and the fact about it being released on the PC.

It was originally made for the Amiga and the Aminet demo has some lovely screenshots (or maybe it was a slideshow, I know there were about 6 screenshots, some of which were only half-complete). Then they got a new graphic artist (he came from Disney) and they re-did all the graphics so it was highly graphical, making it a PC-only release. When it was released, one of the developers and the original graphic artist joined te adventuregamers.com forum so they could promote it a bit and ended up answering lots of questions about the game (including techincal ones about game development), which was very informative. I told the artist the original hand-drawn screenshots were lovely and he was really appreciative of my comments.

I don't think the game sold too well - it had a few issues such as sprite scaling not working well, and a very annoying and loud voice actor doing the part of Gilbert. I played the 2-screen PC demo and got annoyed by him shouting "THAT DOESN'T WORK" whenever I tried to do anything.

The final graphics weren't done on the Amiga as stated in the review.

The demo was on a magazine cover CD, it was either CU or Format.

Yeah, it was included on a Cu Amiga cover CD. I've got the original demo download available on the site now, and it is also on Aminet. However the working Amiga demo, and the screenshots I've taken using it for the main site, don't look anything like the final PC release, which as you mentioned they switched to a Disney artist/animator would explain that. So it is good that we have managed to obtain the original demo to show what they originally was destined to look like.

However, regarding the reasons for ditching the Amiga version, I got the information from interviews with the original developers on a few different sites when I was researching the game and they stated that it was due to the unstable and shrinking market that it was dropped, however they also stated that they were glad because the limitations of the slow Amiga CPUs compared to PC CPUs at the time meant they were being held back. Personally I think that just smells of bad programming. How anyone can't get a point and click adventure to run on an 060 based Amiga (that is the spec they were looking at as a minimum) is beyond me. Look at the number of great adventure games were really nice graphics released for the original A500, and even the standard A1200 can be pushed to do a lot.

And that is, I think, the problem at the end of the Amiga's life, and still the main issue now. Looking through unreleased Amiga games to add them to the site, I noticed that the minimum spec for many was very high. Many required 8MB of RAM and at least an 040 CPU. And then looking at screenshots they looked no different to games being released on the A500 in 1991. So why the high system requirements? Bad or lazy programming!

Of course it's bad and lazy programming. The PC had started top take over and most programmers found it easy to work on PC games because every 6 months a more powerfull version came out so they didn't need to optimise code. If you're looking for some other games tghat were never published try looking in Amiga Format from February 1998 in the previews section as there are about 4 or 5 games in there that never saw the light of day.