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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
[+] [-] mewse|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WoodenChair|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zarkonnen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomAnthony|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] khalwat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrzimmerman|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for being part of all of that!
[+] [-] sli|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nthitz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chongli|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Zarkonnen|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
Any details on what the code was like for these games? I'd love a peek behind the curtain. At the time, it felt incredibly well-polished.
[+] [-] intended|5 years ago|reply
There are so many nova like games out there, but none have the depth of story line that Ambrosia crammed into their world.
I'm happy to have lost so much time in it.
[+] [-] 1123581321|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EamonnMR|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jzer0cool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rezmason|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] saberience|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] khalwat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleazebreeze|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amatecha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mLuby|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smm11|5 years ago|reply
Then came the iPhone.
[+] [-] wlesieutre|5 years ago|reply
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
https://github.com/EvocationGames/KestrelEngine
[+] [-] EamonnMR|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natechols|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unpixer|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] oofabz|5 years ago|reply
The game has been ported to modern OSs: https://github.com/avaraline/Avara/
There is a video of gameplay with commentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AutG8KO4DsY
[+] [-] thegagne|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pvg|5 years ago|reply
It was a great game but it came out after Quake.
[+] [-] kzrdude|5 years ago|reply
I also made level designs for it, using the Canvas editor (no idea which one was standard, but this one worked).
Thanks for the link.
[+] [-] danaris|5 years ago|reply
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.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
[+] [-] dougmwne|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natechols|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] re|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crusso|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)
Ah, Bolo.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
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.
Some of my fondest childhood memories.
[+] [-] re|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaptain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatecha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sitharus|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Talanes|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Detrus|5 years ago|reply
A unique combination of strategy and action.
Played a lot of Escape Velocity too. Those games were special.
[+] [-] somedude895|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatecha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saberience|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomMasz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spike021|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] plasticsoprano|5 years ago|reply