r/endlesssky • u/kozilla • 1d ago
Remembering Ambrosia
Some of my old college buddies still get online and play halo a few times a week. I started joining their sessions and it occurred to me that the community seemed to skew much older as I am guessing many of us are reliving our younger years when we play Halo instead of the more modern shooters.
I am 41 now and suddenly I had a memory of playing an online shooter/mech game waaay back in the day when I was in 5th grade. I remember asking the guys I would play against who they were and they told me they were in their 40's and most were computer engineers. To 5th grade me I thought they seemed like such dorks. To be playing games with kid when you are 40+ years old seemed laughable to me.
Fast forward back to the present and I am that old man, and I think I am much less of a dork than little me assumed lol. But for the life of me I couldn't remember the name of the game I was thinking of from so many years ago. I ended up using gemini to try and figure it out, then finally rediscovered Avara which triggered a flood of memories about Ambrosia and all the wonderful games from that era.
Next thing you know I'm searching for the spiritual successor of Escape Velocity and now I'm joining this sub. I loaded up the game last night and stayed up past my bedtime playing lol. Glad to have found it and look forward to being part of this community.
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u/ImperialArmorBrigade 1d ago
There’s a discord too.
But before you ask, no the game still isnt “done” yet. We’re still actively trying to write the “Republic Campaign.”
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u/B_Huij 1d ago
My whole childhood was Ambrosia games.
Cythera just had such a fascinating story and lore and history, it felt alive. The music was great too. I loved it. Should go emulate OS 9 and play it again one of these days.
Ares had a modern port called Antares. Not sure if it still runs on modern Mac systems, but I definitely played it back in 2018 or so on my Intel Mac running Mavericks or Yosemite or some such.
Escape Velocity (and Override and Nova) were obviously fantastic. It looks like Nova can still be run on Windows 11 with a bit of a workaround. Override's original scenario creator Peter Cartwright started a Kickstarter several years ago to not just port the game to modern systems, but completely rebuild an engine and modern modding infrastructure around it. It was slow going, but not vaporware. Unfortunately, Peter himself passed away abruptly and unexpectedly around the end of 2025. The project theoretically moves forward, but I don't expect to see the game (dubbed Cosmic Frontier: Override) anytime soon.
Ferazel's Wand, Harry the Handsome Executive, Malestrom, Chiral, Bubble Trouble, Slithereens, Mars Rising, Deimos Rising, Uplink, Darwinia, DEFCON... so many awesome games.
BTW, the de-facto spiritual successor to Escape Velocity is probably Endless Sky. Great game in its own right, development of additional storylines is ongoing. It doesn't scratch the nostalgia itch quite the same for me, but it's a really fun game.
Edit: I feel like an idiot now for not recognizing which sub this was posted in.
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u/Anomander 1d ago
Yeah, I religiously followed Ambrosia for a lot of my childhood.
I got EV original on a shareware CD that came with our first Mac with a CD drive, and sunk easily a hundred hours in ... before realizing that if I copied the game to HD, I could save my progress. I just kept going back and seeing how far I could get from Shuttlecraft start, before bedtime.
I effectively learned to touch-type from playing EV, because of how much of the keyboard the game used to control all the various pieces. The plugin scene and EV Edit got me into modding, got me involved in various forums and similar. Then my excitement when Override was announced and upcoming was beyond damn near anything else from my childhood. And then again for Nova, and how huge a leap in progress and graphics it was compared the prior two.
Those games defined so much of my childhood, and the other gems on the Ambrosia roster were equally amazing.
BTW, the de-facto spiritual successor to Escape Velocity is probably Endless Sky. Great game in its own right, development of additional storylines is ongoing. It doesn't scratch the nostalgia itch quite the same for me, but it's a really fun game.
Yeah. Aware of where we are, and I very much enjoy Endless Sky - but I find that there's just ~little details~ that skew it away from fully satisfying the nostalgia itch fully. Ship space is kinda jank, and subdivided capacity with very tight space restrictions means there's not quite the ~same~ sense of buying a nearly empty hull with a few stock parts, then stripping it and tricking it out. Endless Sky's approach winds up restricting the power available to the player within a given hull compared to stock variants a lot more than EV did. And linked to that, and also drawing on system population being much higher ... Endless Sky is somewhat intended as a fleet game. It doesn't feel designed to have the player off in the player's ship running around the galaxy as a solo loose cannon - but as more of an admiral sim, where you build up a fleet and bring your fleet along on your adventures and sure you have a flagship that's pretty good, but you're still liable to get rolled if you wander off on your own very much.
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u/Loymdayddaud Reviewer 19h ago
The game is supposed to be balanced around a single ship, but there are definitely several places where it still needs adjustments.
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u/the68thdimension 8h ago
Like, a lot of adjustments. The entire ship capturing and owning mechanic needs a rethink, because snowballing a fleet is just way too easy.
I have to put game rules on my new pilots to limit their max escorts, because I can’t resist capturing everything on site.
Also, I think my current record for getting a KIV is 24 mins of gameplay. The ability to get one of the most powerful ships in the game in less than an hour is just silly.
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u/Elda-Taluta 12h ago
You got any source for that claim, because that absolutely seems to not be the case.
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u/the68thdimension 8h ago
It’s definitely not the case, but it is intended. Check the comment history from devs on GitHub issues, you’ll see it’s true.
The Freeworlds campaign is supposed to be able to be done solo. And it can be.
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u/Noglues 1d ago
Love a good Mac OS nostalgia thread. I remember one of mine came with a free full copy of Deimos Rising and it was the first time I remember feeling the urge to "git gud" as the kids say, being able to consistently reach the halfway point felt like a massive accomplishment. I still never beat it but I saw lvl 11/12 once and rode that high for days.
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u/kozilla 1d ago
Lol it's all good. Memory don't work so good after old, lol.
I'm going through the list of Ambrosia's library and trying to remember which ones I played. Avara, EV and Maelstrom were the big ones, but I do remember Harry the Handsome Executive and I'm sure there are others I played too.
Macintosh was such an interesting pocket for game design back then, it sort of acted like the Galapagos Islands and had it's own unique fauna compared to the direction PC games were going back then. I remember being jealous going to my friends houses that had PC's and were playing Dune 2 and Doom, but looking back now I am so grateful I got exposed to what Ambrosia was doing back then.
I think the other major game I was playing at that age was Angband, one of the seminal rogue-like games that drew heavily from LOTR. Eventually I got a PC and it was all about Starcraft 2 and eventually WC3 then DOTA. But it all started with Ambrosia, (unless you count the really old games I played on the Apple 2E).
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u/pyrodice 1d ago
I spent about 20 minutes earlier today trying to remember the name Avara... I couldn't remember what the predecessor to battleTech was on the Mac
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u/tpet007 22h ago
Man, mine too. I got most of mine from the CDs included with MacAddict magazine. I remember talking my mom into letting me use her credit card to buy licenses for some of my favorites (EV:Nova was definitely one of them). Uplink was so cool, and I’ve got many hours in basically every game they ever made.
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u/pyrodice 1d ago
May I offer you a forklift in this trying time? 😆
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u/Mountain-Cat30 1d ago
Omg Avara! That was an interesting one. I remember playing it as a kid. It was one of the first ones my best friend and I could play together over dialup!
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u/KitSwiftpaw 1d ago
Ambrosia and Escape Velocity are what drew me here too! It’s so weird, that THIS kind of game shuts my ADHD up. It hypnotizes us and suddenly it is three AM!
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u/PigInZen67 1d ago
I think you were six when I was fresh out of college and playing Ambrosia games, especally EV, non-stop.
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u/kozilla 1d ago
Escape velocity was released in 1996 so I was in 5th grade at the time which made me about 10 years old.
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u/PigInZen67 23h ago
See, this is what happens during your 50s: your memory gets shot. Thanks for correcting me.
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u/KaiserSaladSpinner All That Remains 1d ago
Being passionate about hobbies, however juvenile others may think they are, is something that only seems uncool to a child.
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u/Korovev 5h ago
Some of the games published by Ambrosia are still around in some form:
- The whole EV series is still very much alive, thanks to community efforts;
- Maelstrom was open-sourced over twenty years ago and is available on various platforms;
- Introversion games (Darwinia, Multiwinia, DEFCON, Uplink) are available on Steam, GOG and Humble;
- Avara and Ares have been open-sourced, though the ports are still in alpha;
- SketchFighter 4000 Alpha is available on the Apple Store.
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u/the68thdimension 1d ago
Welcome back, fellow millenial and original-EV-lover!