Andrew kind of took me under his wing during the early days of Ambrosia and taught me a lot about game coding, while I was still in high school.
He eventually bought the rights to a game that I had put together and basically transformed it; it became “Chiral”, which I believe was the second game released by Ambrosia.
For $1500 he got the source code, data, IP rights, and a time-limited non-compete. It seemed like an almost unimaginably large amount of money to me back then (I was in my last year of high school), but I’m sure it was the smallest of his costs in polishing up the game to his standards! In retrospect, I’d be startled if he didn’t decide the code was a complete write-off and needed to be rewritten from scratch; I’d been an absolute neophyte at the time! But he was kind enough not to tell me about it, if so!
Andrew and I still have never met face to face; our conversations were entirely online. And we lost touch shortly after I went off to university. I’m a little embarrassed to have missed this talk, even though was actually in the building at the time. I was exhibiting my own game over in the expo hall, and I had completely lost track of time. Exhibiting your own game is definitely a bit overwhelming; a lot more than exhibiting somebody else’s one!
Andrew was definitely the one who got me seriously into game development and made me think about it as a viable career. In a lot of ways, I’m in the industry today because of him.
In 1999 I was 12 years old and I made an MP3 player in REALBasic. Somehow I had the chutzpah to send it to Ambrosia SW. Instead of laughing me out of the room, not replying, or sending me a routine rejection letter, Andrew took the time to send me a personal letter about why he couldn’t publish it and encouraging me to send him future projects. That act of kindness when you’re just starting out really encourages you. I wonder if I would have kept being as interested in software (at least at the time) if I had gotten something really harsh back.
I spent about fifteen years working at Melbourne House in Australia (which went from being independent to being bought by Infogrammes/Atari, and was then bought by Krome, before finally being wound down, but it was mostly the same awesome group of talented folks for most of that time. At the end, I’d been there for fifteen years and still wasn’t in the top ten list of longest-serving employees; I felt like only a medium-sized fish in a very large pond).
After that, I went to an EA studio for a couple years (which was very difficult for me, as I was put on a smallish team where I literally had more years of experience than everyone else on the team added together; I was suddenly in the very strange situation where any silly thing I said would just be taken as gospel and acted upon, and it took me a very long time to figure out how to behave to mitigate the risks of that). Then I did a couple years in (non-games) statistics software to pad out my resume a bit and show that I could do non-games work as well.
After that, I started freelancing, doing both games and non-games work, to support myself while I worked on my own game, which is now up on Steam in Early Access. Freelancing was a lot of fun, and I love the freedom to switch between projects and solve the most difficult problems of one project and then moving on to a new, different project with a new ‘most difficult’ problem to solve. Though obviously the lack of job security was a bit of a strange new experience, after spending my whole career on a salary!
I also spent a couple years acting as an advisor on the local Film Victoria’s games funding grant program, helping select projects to allocate grant funds toward and just generally advising applicants (whether or not they eventually received funding). I’m super proud of the work those folks do and that I got to be a small part of it for a while. I feel like the blossoming we’ve seen here in the local indie games scene has a lot to do with their support for the industry.
Former Ambrosia employee checking in! TomWoozle was my handle back then.
I worked at the company from 2003-2005, having (like many here) grown up on their games and spent hours modding Escape Velocity.
I mainly worked on the website (I wrote a version of the online store ground up in PHP), but also ran testing for a while and worked managing the later Windows conversion of EV Nova.
It was an incredible place to work and I learnt so so much. Andrew was an amazing mentor and an extremely generous guy. My time there absolutely changed my life.
One thing that stands out, and it feels like something that won’t be regained from that era, is that everyone there was just having great great fun. I loved going to work. We were a business, but I never remember money being the deciding factor in any decision. It was all passion.
I miss those times!
If people are interested AMA (though late here so may be tomorrow when I answer).
Omg you're on here too! Please Andrew let me take this moment to tell you that there is a huge market of people who will absolutely throw money at you if you make a new game. look at the success of the kickstarter for cosmic frontier and that's a relatively small endeavor. If you try to make something new people will freak out.
I know it's been a long time but I hope that spark is still there. I and many others grew up playing your games and we are hungry for more.
Oh wow. I just wanted to say thanks to you and any other people here from Ambrosia, EV was easily the best game of my childhood. Saving up for a Kestrel took me... a lot of cargo runs. But I loved every minute.
It's telling that of all the objectively better, more expensive, more complex space games I've played since my middle school years... Escape Velocity still ranks #1 in terms of sheer joy.
It feels a lot like Populous: more fun than the sum of its parts, and only explicable as tapping some Miyamotoesque yearning in the zeitgeist.
Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of that for me was that the universe felt very alive - ships coming and going from planets, comms, recurring characters. I haven't found anything quite like it since, though Starsector comes close in some ways (and is extremely good in its own way, you should check it out if you haven't).
To this day Basilisk mac emulator is one of the first things I install on a new PC build just so I can play EV!
26 years or so and I still love that series
Thanks so much!
I know these things can be legal quagmires, but it would be great if you and your former colleagues could release activated copies of your software, somewhere. I was able to track down Soundboard after a lot of digging, but EasyEnvelopes seems to have disappeared from the internet. It would be a shame if it was just lost to history.
Please do if possible! It's slightly irritating needing to do the hacky workaround to get my expired license code to work when I want to re-play EV Nova and fart around as an OP Vellos or Polaris haha.
That's such a happy, beautiful story. EV and EV Nova are still some of my all time favorite games. I used to have to play it at a friends house because he had a Power Mac so when it came to Windows I was beyond excited.
As for the Windows release of Nova, I had the honour of packaging that up and releasing it. I still remember exactly where I was when I pressed the button!
People on IRC were going wild! I was so fortunate to be part of it.
What I wouldn't give for an updated version of Barrack that runs on modern machines. I've been tempted in the past to attempt a 1:1 clone of it, but I just don't have the time to get into gamedev.
Ah I remember TomWoozle as one of the super advanced ships in EV:N. I'm guessing a few staff members had them? They were always intimidating and very powerful, was a treat to see them as a kid.
Yes, I had a character in the game. I had an extremely over powered ship, and then if you managed to defeat me and board the ship you would find I only had a single credit.
I was a beta tester for EV Nova before I joined as a staff member. I got the character for winning a bet against Andrew Welch that I could hack the shareware mechanism of Snapz Pro (the screen capture tool). I did it by ignoring the shareware code itself, and instead patching the watermark code so the rectangle was 0x0. So you got nagged but the tool worked.
I spent hours as a kid trying to figure out the serial number scheme for Ambrosia games. (Sorry.) I had learned how to read PowerPC assembly but the Ambrosia registration application was obfuscated and had very long functions I couldn't follow, I suspect compiled from machine-generated C.
Andrew dropped an enigmatic hint once that it involved "polynomials" and when I eventually learned about these in school I spent a lot of time wondering how you could turn one into a serial number.
Maybe @khalwat can finally reveal the answer to a question I've had for at least 20 years?
I remember them changing the licensing system, it was shortly before I started at the company. Matt Slot, who was the lead coder alongside Andrew, wrote an article about it which I've managed to find archived [1].
The article doesn't shed a lot more light on it, but the rough understanding (between my understanding at the time and what I've lost to memory!) was that it was similar to public key cryptography, with a public key in the app that could be used to verify license codes signed with the private key.
Thanks for sharing, Tom. I grew up playing Ambrosia games. I spent countless hours on all the Escape Velocity games. Loved every minute!
it feels like something that won’t be regained from that era
How might you attribute these feelings? Is it the vastly increased competition in games and the race to the bottom in mobile app stores? Microtransactions and monetization strategies?
I still try to support a lot of my favourite indie developers. I buy Spiderweb software games because I played them so much as a kid. I think it’s awesome that Jeff can still keep doing what he loves.
I think it was a product of the era, because nowadays games are either big budget with huge teams, or they are indie games which will struggle to differentiate themselves from the crowd.
Back then, there weren't the tools available for most single devs to launch a full game (which is where Ambrosia came in with a suite of libraries, artists, and knowledge) as they can do nowadays. So there wasn't a huge mass of games, and also there was an overhead to releasing something- nowadays you can throw things up on the App Store and see if it sticks (not diminishing anything from the amazing people working on things nowadays). Ambrosia had a phone line you could phone for free at any time to get tech support!
So Ambrosia games were not big budget but they were created by people who loved what they were doing and who had the expertise to make games with great playability. Nowadays that is possible, but it strikes me as harder to differentiate yourself.
Once something is big budget and with a big team, I think the dynamics change a lot. On a small team every voice could be heard, everyone could have an impact on the direction of the game.
I was a huge Ambrosia fan back in the day, so thank you for stopping by!
One thing I don't understand is why Ambrosia never put their back catalogue on Steam. At least with EV Nova's Windows version, it seems to me that if you stripped out the licencing system and tossed it up on Steam, you could have had a nice income stream from there. I'd have bought it.
Most of the other games you might have been able to package into an emulator, like GOG games running in DOSbox.
But that's my outside perspective, so maybe there were bigger legal or technical hurdles?
I was also a fan before I was an employee. I know the love they inspired!
I had moved on from Ambrosia before Steam became a thing, but have also wondered the same. I did point this thread out to Andrew, and he has dropped in some replies, so maybe he can shed some light. I would guess it is a case of all the legal shenanigans needed to make it happen cleanly. Various people external to Ambrosia own various parts of the rights, so you would need to get a bunch of people on board and spend money on lawyers.
I also thought some games could be suited to something like the Nintendo Switch. However, that would obviously need a bunch of technical work to convert it (something I admit to having looked into late last year!).
I also played many many hours of Maelstrom! That particular game is now open source [1].
On the whole, the main code of most games was not written by Ambrosia. There was a form on the website where you could submit a simple demo of a game idea you had. If Ambrosia thought it had potential then we would sign you up, to support the development, publishing and distribution.
Ambrosia had a series of libraries, which were a mixture of C and Assembler, for graphics and sound etc. We had an in house graphic artist. And, of course, the shareware licensing code and mechanism.
It was a great model. Coders with an idea could get support to take their game to the next level, and sell it etc. It all seems so easy now but the net was in its infancy then. We were mailing out CDs filled with the games.
I never got my hands dirty of the game code, but I know the libraries we had were well polished and optimised, and so were very valuable to coders (no stack overflow back then!).
So, I'm not sure how much of the code is near-original Macintosh version code, and how much was revised/replaced to support SDL. Probably lots of original stuff though, surely.
Yeah, EV Nova was HUGE. The content was primarily the product of ATMOS studios in Australia. It started out as a plugin for EV Override, but Ambrosia bought the rights and helped turn it into the 3rd iteration of the game.
The original EV was great to explore in, but fairly linear (two main threads to the storyline, I believe), but Nova was massive with so many routes through, I doubt anyone ever saw it all!
That's great to hear. He's still generous and giving to developer communities in what he's doing now. Learned a ton from him and his tools make our work better.
I'm very curious about the development of WinNova and it's unique windows resource format, Rez. My understanding is that it went through two porting companies is that true? And any idea which one developed Rez? Was it a standard tool for porting mac games, or something that was developed just for Nova?
My memory of this is imperfect and I joined as the project was already underway, but I believe there were two companies, yes.
The main POC at the second company that got the project completed was Rebecca Heineman [1] from Contraband Entertainment; my job was facilitating comms and help manage and organise the beta testing. I also built the installer.
I _believe_ that yes, Rez was created specifically for this. All EV modders know that the resource fork part of files was a critical part of how EV data files, and all mods, worked. There was a huge dependency there, and so I think the decision was made to create Rez to fill that gap. However, that is the extent of my knowledge.
I joined Ambrosia in late 2002 as part of a 'sandwich degree' as we call it in the UK. I was doing a 4 year BSc in Computer Science, where the 3rd year was spent as a year in industry. For that I moved to upstate NY to work for Ambrosia. It was a dream for someone who had grown up modding EV (like so many here apparently!).
I returned to the UK and kept working for Ambrosia from the UK whilst finishing my studies and for a while after. Andrew offered me a role at Ambrosia and I _agonised_ about the decision as I loved the company but ultimately I was too afraid of moving to the US without an end date there. I often wonder if that was a mistake.
I then did freelance web dev for a couple of years, before going back to Uni to do a PhD in AI. I found out I was going to be a father, and freelance web dev wouldn't cut it any more so I joined an SEO consultancy (Distilled), having taught myself a lot of that building small company websites.
In February of this year, the SaaS project I led at Distilled spun out as its own company SearchPilot (https://www.searchpilot.com/). I know SEO doesn't have a great reputation on HN, but what I love about SearchPilot is it applies A/B testing to SEO to remove the mystery, hand waving, and everything else. My focus is on the product and the network infrastructure side of things, but we are a small team so I get to do all sorts.
I do miss both the fun of working on games, and being part of the joy people would experience (as this thread shows). I also miss the AI research, as it was an interesting set of intellectual challenges.
The Ambrosia game portfolio's biggest impact was just being so much more polished than Mac games typically were at the time. The publishing model, I suppose, afforded them the resources it required to make everything really pop.
I remember the first time my brother and I ran Maelstrom. The splash screen was hypnotic. I was like, "Computers can do this?"
Back then their Zeus logo had me thinking they were a team of like a hundred people.
Also, I probably wouldn't have spent any time in ResEdit if it weren't for games like Ambrosia's that encouraged folks to make custom sprite and sound packs.
Dude, your mention of ResEdit just gave me major flashbacks! I remember first using ResEdit to "hack" games like Escape Velocity so I could gain more resources, make my ships more powerful, and so on.
God I loved their games SO much. As a kid that was not allowed any consoles and only had a Mac IICX, Ambrosia games were a lifesaver!
No, you made my childhood! I was kind of a lonely kid and discovering computing (via the Mac) and getting these shareware discs and playing Ambrosia games was like finding something really magical. Thank you! And if anyone is reading this now, please make more games like Escape Velocity! (Or re-release them for modern systems!)
I made that game in college with the help of some very talented artists, and my friends who helped with the sound effect. It was written on a Mac IIsi IIRC! We def had fun making it (and playing it while making it) /andrew
Modding Escape Velocity games was a critical part of my childhood and probably set me on the path of becoming a software engineer.
The parts in this post about the 90s Mac fanaticism are spot-on. I remember having many arguments with friends and neighbors that all were "Winblowz" users and my feelings of smug superiority over them.
I mean, there was a lot of reason to feel that way. My friends were struggling with DOS and autoexec.bat/config.sys and IRQ settings and sometimes didn't even have sound cards (still remember when my friend's birthday gift was a sound card lol), playing 320x240 resolution games. Meanwhile I was gaming away at 640x480 256 colors, with 16-bit stereo 22khz or 44khz sound. Yeah, we didn't have quite the same selection of games, but we had some damn good exclusives. Bolo, Escape Velocity (and everything else from Ambrosia), Marathon, Battle-Girl, Realmz, so many others I can't remember the names of.
http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html makes a reference to how it worked under the hood. It turns out that it didn't take a lot of home modems in the game to make the game unusable.
30 years later any computer system I control is still named after something in that game. Investors in 4 countries pump millions of dollars in orders through a cluster named marathon. The roots grow deep ;)
The first computer I built from scratch contained a completely superfluous sound card. It was 2008, my motherboard could handle audio completely fine. But growing up during the era of NEEDING a sound card for sound, I just mindlessly put one in.
It's easy to forget the historical context, in an era when the web and cross-platform toolchains have made computing platform choices a function of taste and preference. Bleeding-edge PC gaming and niche applications notwithstanding, we take for granted that any computer can do any task, be it Mac or Windows or Linux.
But in the 90's, desktop Linux and the web were still in their infancy, and Windows held a quasi-hegemony over computing. Mac was the only alternative, constantly fighting for survival, both of Apple itself, and of the legitimacy of the platform ("why should we double our development budget to chase a market with 3% share?" went the refrain). The prominent black Mac blogger Rodney Lain went so far as to compare the "second-class citizen" feeling of being a Mac user to his African-American experience [0].
So yeah, it went over the top, and I got caught up in it too. To some extent, selection pressures were at work: the pragmatically-minded shrugged and bought PCs, and the religious ideologues were the only ones left clinging to their Macs (and each other) for dear life.
It's ironic that Apple has become a far greater hegemon/monopolist than Microsoft in its hey-day. ("You die a hero or live to become the villain.") Nonetheless, for all our struggles with walled gardens and data silos, in some ways the modern computing ecosystem enjoys much greater platform fluidity and interoperability than 25 years ago. Everything speaks web; everything speaks *-nix; and there are a plethora of tools that make it feasible to target a dozen different platforms with the same codebase.
It's the same as Amiga fanaticism. Hardware is more expensive, software is a lot more arcane. People put a lot of work into getting their computers to work the way they wanted to.
iOS is a utility to me, I already have my set patterns of working with it, and some new feature that changes that only happens once in a few years.
I'm in the same boat. I learned to engineer software because I realized that just modding a dead engine that other people had to pay to use wasn't going to cut it, and if I wanted to make games I was gonna have to program them myself.
I took a different route to working in software, but I certainly spent many years wishing I knew enough to write something like EV. (Now the problem is insufficient time and energy, of course.)
Long ago, Ambrosia Software had a booth at one of the major tech conferences. Contests, trivia questions, t-shirts to win, the usual. Also, they were at the end of a major push to fix bugs in their games, and to celebrate they'd cooked up a bunch of food with bugs in it, and--somehow--convinced their marketing guy to eat the stuff in front of a bunch of attendees. (Maybe he lost a bet?)
And yes, I mean actual bugs. Insects. I'm talking roach pizza, worm casserole, that sort of thing.
Anyway, he shilly-shallied a bit, and finally agreed to do it, as long as he got to wash the stuff down with wine. (I'm assuming this part was staged as they'd brought a bottle.)
There was just one problem.
No corkscrew.
An appeal went out to the couple of dozen attendees: "Does anyone have a corkscrew?" Bunch of nerds at a tech conference, and nobody had a corkscrew...what are the chances?
Well, nobody except me, because I'm so ragingly dorky I never go anywhere without a Swiss Army knife of some sort.
I offered it up, the bottle was opened, there were cheers, and the guy standing next to me began lobbying the employees to give me a free t-shirt. Other attendees around him took up the chant, and the Ambrosia Software employees, to their credit, handed me a t-shirt when they returned my knife. It was a really nice one, black cotton with that big square maroon Ambrosia Software logo on the back, and the single word 'thaumaturgy' on the front in white lowercase monospaced font.
I wore that shirt for years afterward, until it somehow got lost in the shuffle of dropping laundry off at the laundromat. I'm still sad about its loss, because I was wearing that t-shirt the first time I talked to the woman who later became my wife. It was the shirt that initially caught her attention. We're still together to this day.
So thank you, Ambrosia Software. Thanks for the games...and everything else.
This was before my time at Ambrosia, but I did work the booth at a few shows in different cities (San Fran, LA, Paris being memories). Your story definitely sounds like the sort of thing that would go down.
I also don't have any t-shirts anymore, but EV:Nova mouse mats are still used at my Mum's house!
For me, it was Avara. An online multiplayer FPS in 1996, when 3D graphics and the internet still felt like science fiction. The skill ceiling was high and games were very competitive. Shout out to the ®ed §quadron, the clan I was in. I am still in touch with friends I met in the game, more than 20 years later.
I loved Avara. The level edit capability offered so much freedom.
You can find my first level, “chut” out on the internet. My other, better levels, are lost to me.
I reverse engineered something I saw in a demo level, where they took doors, triggered them to “open” both vertically and horizontally and set them at the half way point to create “corner” pieces.
No other maps had these pieces, and I was fascinated with the idea of using them to create terrain. I ended up making a “quilt” like structure of ramps and corner pieces to make a unique arena. I had not taken any upper level geometry yet so I was just doing it by trial and error. Fun times.
I also found you could import wav files and trigger them so I made a jukebox level, which was absolutely massive (uncompressed audio!).
I remember sharing these maps by trying to lure people to join my server, but transferring them could take some time because I was on 26.4 modem at the time.
Avara was probably my first “development” experience... amazing.
As someone who grew up on Ambrosia games—from Maelstrom and Apeiron to EV Nova and pop-pop—I'm honestly glad that the company ended the way it did, rather than getting sold off to some megacorporation like Activision or EA and having its soul destroyed and its name tarnished.
Ambrosia Software defined an era, for those who lived in the Mac world during that time, and while it would have made me happy to see them continue on, I think the circumstances that allowed them to exist and be successful could only exist during that era.
Also worth noting that there's been a recent successful Kickstarter[0] for a modern remake of/successor to EV Override, called Cosmic Frontier: Override. The impression I've gotten so far from the updates is that their timeline for release is going to be some time in the 2022-23ish time frame.
Shout out to EV Nova, still one of my top 5 videogames. It was the 3rd game in the series and the most polished. It had multiple storylines you could play through and each was epic and memorable.
EV:N was really mindopening for me as a kid. What blew my mind the most is that my decisions actually made a concrete impact on the world. It was so cool playing the different storylines and seeing solar systems change hands and new technologies appear because of my actions
Any chance some of the copyright holders would be interested in open-sourcing the code? Escape Velocity in particular. EDIT: especially since these games are no longer playable without registration, ouch. Hope I still have my EV Nova code somewhere.
Someone has made an open-source clone called Endless Sky, I believe there are unofficial ports of the various EV campaigns to the ES engine. http://endless-sky.github.io/
It's not Escape Velocity, but Maelstrom was open-sourced [1]!
A while ago I forked a version and changed the braking power-up to be controlled by a button press, instead of always active [2]. It was cool to fix something that always bugged me in a game I played when I was a kid.
Works great! If you're on Ubuntu/Debian/etc, you'll need to apt install libsdl1.2-dev and libsdl-net1.2-dev. I thought something was wrong when the build took less than 2 seconds, but it turns out computers have gotten faster in the last 25 years.
Keep an eye on Cosmic Frontier: Override. It's not the original code, but it will be a re-release of the Override scenario in a new engine designed for data file compatibility with the whole series, plus new features.
I gather the rights to EVN are a more complicated issue because ATMOS was a whole bunch of people, versus EVO where Peter Cartwright owned everything. Rights to the EV name still belong to Matt Burch who wasn't interested in having it used for Cartwright's rerelease.
The answer is a definitive no. Matt Burch has made it pretty clear that he is not gonna open source it. Luckily there are two very good clones (Naev and Endless Sky) and a third got kickstarted (Cosmic Frontier.)
You can use the expired code by resetting your computer’s clock to the date and time right after the original purchase supposedly.
I haven’t been able to test this because my Nova code was a gift and I have no idea when it was purchased, but if you have the original email with the registration code it’s a possible solution.
I'm still bummed that the removal of Carbon and 32-bit support in macOS Catalina meant the final death of running EV Nova natively on macOS. It got me checking out emulation options for older OSes to see if there would be a way that I could ever play it again, but I either couldn't get them to boot properly (for most versions of OS X), or the performance was too poor (in Sheepshaver).
I'm with you on this, and it's part of why I'm still running Sierra on my Mac. Ironically, I think the easiest way to run classic Mac games like EV Nova is on Windows (your old license key should work if you rollback the clock on your computer, and there's cracked versions floating around too)
Sadly my license key was lost along with my old AIM email address (!), and the Ambrosia representative I spoke to was unable retrieve it for me. I'll have to try finding the cracked version...
I played sooo much of Bolo. Still one of my top-favorite games ever. I was so into it, I printed out guides and read them when I couldn't actively play the game. I started to memorize the different "pill-taking" layouts so I could easily take a base so quickly and flawlessly. Well, needless to say my skills weren't too useful because I wasn't able to arrange AppleTalk games of Bolo very often... but when we played, I usually destroyed!!! hahaha :) Ahh, such a great game. :)
Bolo was a cult phenomenon back in its heyday in the early-to-mid 1990s. It was a game with a great deal of tactical and strategic depth that it allowed a huge range of player ability. It definitely wasn't the kind of game where some newbie could just start playing and get a lucky win or be a master in days or weeks. It felt more like a sport where you needed to practice the basics (like you mentioned on taking PBs) while you also learned a lot about strategy.
My favorite times were the Bolofests where traveling boloers would come into town and we'd all get together to play on a LAN.
I bought a Mac Plus recently, and one of the new things I installed on it's MASSIVE 20 megabytes hard drive was Bolo. And then I proceeded to waste a good hour playing it all sadly by myself without the Localtalk network that used to be full of games, back in the day. sniffle
Soooo there's actually one really cool thing you can do: run additional copies of Bolo with "brains" like aIndy, Brainwave or so on which act as actual players (sometimes a lot better than actual players haha) ... This was another really fascinating feature of Bolo that many other multiplayer games never had. So you can have simulated multiplayer! Worth a try!
I know... but it's not the same as hearing the screams of despair as your arch-tank-enemy gets destroyed by your cleverly laid mine from across the office floor! :-)
Oh yeah, very true indeed! First time I played was at a course at a university. Was amazing energy having ~8-person Bolo matches. Unforgettable experience tbh :)
Escape Velocity + ResEdit was how I got into programming at 8 years old.
Back then I didn't have internet access and had hours upon hours of time to explore my family mac without distraction. I came across ResEdit and teduously learned how to change stuff in the game. First thing I learned is to always back up your software. I would make mods for my brother to play. Javelin Spray was my favourite.
My brother and I would also daisy chain AFB keyboards and he would control the ship and I would control the escorts.
I had a similar experience, though in my case I didn't come to the series until EV:O. My ambitions to create a TC (total conversion) plugin far exceeded both my abilities and persistence. I did have internet access and the escape-velocity.com DiscBoards (before they were merged into the ASW forums) were one of my first online communities. They were also where I first started learning HTML, in order to have a cool "signature"--I'm not sure exactly how much was allowed, but I do recall working on one that involved animated GIFs and a table to reassemble a sliced image, so I'll apologize a few decades later to anyone else that I may have annoyed with my enthusiasm.
Ambrosia is probably the most legendary Mac game developer. There was no other singular studio whose games were so avidly anticipated and played. Such well-polished games, with great gameplay. I can easily recall every single game they ever made. I think Maelstrom was the first one I played. Great memories :)
Oh wow this brings back memories. I spent many of my teenage year playing, modding and beta testing the Escape Velocity games. I learnt 3d modelling for modding using a pirated copy of lightwave (I’m not proud, but a 13 year old in New Zealand was never going to afford that - even the shareware fee for the games made my dad think)
I spent so much time on the IRC server and forums I ended up moderating the ev developers board, even on the unofficial ones after the software change drama. I used the inventive nickname ‘blackhole’ then. Teenagers. Met a lot of weird and wonderful people.
I’ve been checking on the site every so often since 2008, but it’s sad to see them go. It was a special time.
It would be great if it was easier to get Lightwave in the hands of every interested 13 year old.
One kid I grew up with was homeschooled, and his mom had all the proper registration to buy school discounted software. His mom was able to get him a copy of Lightwave to play around with at home. He's been an animator at Sony for about a decade now.
This game actually helped kickstart my foray into digital music recording, because I loved the music from Ares and wanted to extract the music files from the game so I could listen to them. Turned out the songs were stored as "MADH" resources and I saved them out to individual files -- and it turns out these MADH files were a "tracker music" format created by and playable with the software "PlayerPRO". Thus all the first songs I ever created on the computer sounded a lot like Ares' music because I ripped all my samples from the game's songs! hahah :) Wasn't long before I realized I can use any audio file though, and recorded all kinds of stuff to create new sounds with.
Either way, I forever can credit Nathan Lamont and Ares for being the reason I discovered the world of computer-made music. (yes, I still remember his name today lol)
I live just down the street from their office. I remember their parking lot full of cars. Then one day, it was empty and there was a large sign on the front door. Their sign is still up, oddly enough.
I really miss EV: Nova. It's probably one of the games I've re-played the most. I even kept playing it for the longest time with the expired trial where the ultra-modded, overpowered Starbridge follows you around to kill you for not paying for the full version.
Not easy to install anymore with the license server down and all, and I've tried playing the games that try to be clones but they've never really hit the same way.
It's worth noting that two of the people who worked on escape velocity are creating a remastered version of sorts, called Cosmic Frontier. Search for the kickstarter and you'll find their project updates!
Ambrosia was my first meeting with message boards. I joined in 2000 I think. I loved to play EV, Override, Nova, and Ferazel's Wand. The EV games combined with Resedit were my first forays into modding games, and Ferazel's Wand along with Mascot was great fun. I still run SheepShaver on my modern systems because of Ambrosia Software.
A friend of mine, who was also a member and fan, wrote a personal reimagination of Barrack as a hobby project while learning coding. While it does lack the ever-charming Bosco, the gameplay is still good!
There's a game from the 90s called Hyperspeed by MicroProse that I wish someone would do a similar writeup on. I freaking loved that game and I can't find it anywhere now.
I wasn't gonna post this until it was more Done, but if anyone is reading this they might enjoy my multiplayer EV clone in Godot: https://github.com/eamonnmr/mpevmvp
The server runs best on Linux, and you need to host a server (press host server in the main menu) before you can play. It's not very complete but most of the basics are there.
The details escape me, but I recall being about 13 around 1990, 1992?, newly into coding, and meeting up with Andrew Welch in some kind of chat forum. What I remember was that he was incredibly kind and offered words of encouragement for my budding programming future. Ambrosia was a serious fan favorite for their commitment to quality games. The 90s were exciting times for software.
All this talk of Escape Velocity inspired me to do a bit of googling, and I just wanted to let everyone know that Captain Hector's namesake (Hector D Byrd) has his own twitter and will be turning 28 in about a month: https://twitter.com/hectordbyrd
Ah, nostalgia. I bought a 2006-ish Mac Mini recently just so I could go back and play Ambrosia stuff. Managed to get Sketchfighter and Diemos Rising working, but not Gooball unfortunately - this was since the registration server went down, and I guess the DRM hasn't been cracked.
Reading the ending hits closer to home and made me more sad than expected!
Andrew Welch was uneasy about the idea of scaling up, especially when they could survive as they were just fine off their utility products
Way back in the day, YC always said not to worry about competitors raising tons of money (not sure if that's still the rec). The 2008 DHH boostrapping talk during Startup School is still one of the most influential videos on my career as a founder. But that path is increasingly less popular!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
Lastly, for all the bolo comments out there, I remember the huge transition from modems to school ethernet that made it playable - it was honestly one of the reasons I was looking forward to dorm life!
He eventually bought the rights to a game that I had put together and basically transformed it; it became “Chiral”, which I believe was the second game released by Ambrosia.
For $1500 he got the source code, data, IP rights, and a time-limited non-compete. It seemed like an almost unimaginably large amount of money to me back then (I was in my last year of high school), but I’m sure it was the smallest of his costs in polishing up the game to his standards! In retrospect, I’d be startled if he didn’t decide the code was a complete write-off and needed to be rewritten from scratch; I’d been an absolute neophyte at the time! But he was kind enough not to tell me about it, if so!
Andrew and I still have never met face to face; our conversations were entirely online. And we lost touch shortly after I went off to university. I’m a little embarrassed to have missed this talk, even though was actually in the building at the time. I was exhibiting my own game over in the expo hall, and I had completely lost track of time. Exhibiting your own game is definitely a bit overwhelming; a lot more than exhibiting somebody else’s one!
Andrew was definitely the one who got me seriously into game development and made me think about it as a viable career. In a lot of ways, I’m in the industry today because of him.