The Rise and Fall of Ambrosia Software (2019)
lifeandtimes.games
lifeandtimes.games
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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?
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.
I found a Reddit post that explains most of the algorithm, but not much to do with polynomials. https://www.reddit.com/r/evnova/comments/g3ie3x/ambrosia_and...
(P.S., I did pay my registration fee for Uplink. Thanks for porting it!)
The activation stuff is beyond what I can offer, but I do speak to Andrew sometimes and will raise it with him. :)
Thanks for being part of all of that!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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!).
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 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.
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!
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.
Then came the iPhone.
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.
[0] https://www.macobserver.com/columns/ibrotha/2001/20010928.sh...
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.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
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.
Heck my old C64 had better sound than PCs (and Macs) of the time.
It's such a shame that Commodore were so badly mismanaged.
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 ;)
It has a dynamic economy, and opportunity to build your own faction.
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.
I also don't have any t-shirts anymore, but EV:Nova mouse mats are still used at my Mum's house!
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
It was a great game but it came out after Quake.
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.
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.
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...
Is it still around? Or did it go to the graveyard of oblivion where games go to die?
Last release in May?
Version 0.9.2 released May 1, 2020
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maelstrom_(1992_video_game)#Le...
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.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
https://github.com/EvocationGames/KestrelEngine
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.
Also see discussion on reddit for more background info: https://www.reddit.com/r/evnova/comments/g5wgbl/i_discuss_co...
There are a couple threads scattered around, u/evopac is Peter Cartwright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)
Ah, Bolo.
My favorite times were the Bolofests where traveling boloers would come into town and we'd all get together to play on a LAN.
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.
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.
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.
A unique combination of strategy and action.
Played a lot of Escape Velocity too. Those games were special.
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)
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.
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!
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.
Ambrosia was a huge part of my early days with the Mac. Such great stuff!
Deimos Rising was also a lot of fun.
Strangely, I never got into Escape Velocity. I think maybe I'd stopped using Macs by then.
> You must enable DRM to play some audio or video on this page.
Uhh... what's up with that?
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!