Not the most original game here, with a clone of the classic “Star Paws”, where you control a space man who has to protect his crop of vegetables from a mass of alien lifeform. No space turkeys to chase, but plenty of action and some enhanced graphics than the Software Projects original.
Now this game was quite a mystery really. It first really popped up on a special Commodore Scene free games disk, with no details about it at all. The only distinguishable thing about the game and its existence, is the Adam Gilmore music, which is a dead giveaway (The style is easy to match to him).
Searching through the game’s code actually reveals from the music credits, that this was for MicroValue, which was Flair’s budget label at the time.
So what happened? This game never was heard of back in the days of Zzap and Commodore Format, and no-one could own up to owning an original. The game itself did not even have any credits or linkage to MicroValue in anyway.
We years later found out that the game was to be published as a favour to Peter Johnson from Colin Courtney, so that he would produce other games for them. David Mowbray produced all the graphics after being asked for a favour by Colin to do so. After David completed the graphics and sent them back, that was the last he heard. (Read Creator Speaks for more). It seemed maybe it was a little too late for Flair to release the game, maybe the C64 scene was starting to fade too much.
A clue about its release could be found in the inlay of Demon Blue (thanks to Zoë Blade for the heads up) , where it says to look out for Space Vegetables.
Well, it has been found that the game was released, but in a very limited form! Andreas has kindly contributed a scan of a compilation box which MicroValue released towards the end of its life. This contains the Space Vegetables Corp game, and is where probably the game was preserved from.
It seems that the compilation was done just before MicroValue left the C64 market, and sold the compilation to get a small bit of money back. As a result, the game never got a proper full release and is very rare to find. The game is pretty decent, so a shame it didn’t get more people playing it back in the day.
Case closed!
Contributions: David Mowbray, Zoë Blade
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Game_Spaceveg.zip (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
David Mowbray speaks about work on Space Vegetable Corps…
“I personally did the graphics for that one as a favour to Colin Courtney, the owner of Flair and MicroValue, as far as I know, that game was about to be published as a personal favour to its coder, Colin wanted that guy to do some other work, and publishing Veg was part of the deal. I cannot remember the guy’s name, but it was the same bloke that did the ST version of Wizball….
I really only got a telephone call asking if I would tart up some graphics for a game they had, I got the source graphics via the mail, spent a day or so re-drawing them, and shot them off back to Flair, that was the last I hear about the project.
Although at the time I was a coder, I also did a lot of game art and animation so I used to get given graphics to do a lot as I had full knowledge of what would work and what was impossible etc.”
David Mowbray.
Update history
22/06/26 – Link made with Demon Blues inlay.
Yes, this one was definitely for Microvalue — Demon Blue’s inlay card says to look out for Space Vegetables.
Thanks Zoë! Will add a quick note to the page :)