1998 Crystal Interactive
Platform: Commodore Amiga
Also known as: Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria
Our next entry is for a Monkey Island inspired graphic adventure game called Gilbert Goodmate which was eventually released on PC, but was due to have a release on the Amiga too. The game started out originally as a hobby project in 1996. It got picked up originally by Alive Mediasoft, before being picked up by Crystal Interactive with plans for release in 1998.
It seems that this was another casualty of a fading Amiga market at the time, and so the focus was switched to the PC edition – which eventually saw release in 2001, published by FastTrak Software.
The story line was as follows:
Many years ago a brave hero saved the land from unavoidable destruction by killing the evil wizard with the help of a gigantic mushroom.
Nowadays the mushroom is kept in a museum in the city of Phungoria. The citizens take turns guarding and preserving the mushroom from year to year. Every summer a big mushroom-festival is being held, when the people celebrate the ancient victory. During this cermony a new citizen is elected to take the huge responsibility of keeping the mushroom safe and in good shape until next year’s festival.
For nearly a year now, Gilbert’s grandfather has been taking care of the mushroom. But one week prior to the festival, someone steals the mushroom. Everyone blames the grandfather for not being able to do his duty properly. The king throws him in jail and prepares to have him executed during the
festival.The only way to save his grandfather is for Gilbert to find the stolen mushroom before the end of the week…
Then there were plans for:
- 35-40 beautifully hand drawn locations.
- 15-20 protracker modules.
- At least 4000 frames of animation. (Gilbert himself is made up of over 200 frames).
- Digitized speech for every character appearing in the game.
- A very intuitive user-interface.
- Inventory close-ups of certain objects.
- A really entertaining storyline.
At this stage, it isn’t clear if the Amiga version got anywhere near completion – though thankfully a demo has managed to sneak out over the years, which you can download below. It’s a neat early glimpse at a promising development with some basic interactions that you can carry out.
Recently in May 2025, one of the developers – Daniel Edfeldt posted online about the title, and shared some rare screenshots from the Amiga version that haven’t been seen before. These can be found below in the gallery. It is hoped that due to those screens, a much more complete version exists that could some day be preserved. Watch this space, and hopefully that will be the case!
With a huge thank you to Tony Aksnes for highlighting and information.
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