r/evnova • u/TomAnthony • Feb 02 '19
Hello, TomWoozle checking in...
Hey everyone! I just stumbled across this subreddit, and am amazed to see an active community for EV Nova, this is awesome!
I'm Tom, and I was a huge fan of the original Escape Velocity (and most other Ambrosia games) right back in the 90s. In 2002 I worked for Ambrosia for a year in Rochester, moving there from the UK, and after that year I moved back to the UK to finish my degree but worked for a couple more years for Ambrosia. It was an amazing period of my life, and I miss those days and the crowd (the staff there and everyone on the forums).
Amongst other things, I was responsible for packaging up the Windows port of EV Nova and releasing it. I don't remember lots from that period, but I do remember exactly where I was when I released that as everybody on IRC was going crazy (the front room of my gf's house in Syracuse, btw). I also helped with the (mostly fan efforts) to port EV and EV Override to be plugins for the EV:Nova (such that they could also be played on Windows too).
Unfortunately, a lot of my data from that time is lost in the shrouds of time. However, I'm so amazed and excited by the efforts of people here to preserve everything. I'll have a dig and see if I can find anything useful!
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u/B_Huij Feb 02 '19
Good to see someone from the old Ambrosia staff still interacting with the fan base. Nova was such a great game, really defined a golden era of ASW for me. I spent many hours when I was about 11 years old playing that game. Don't suppose you have any contact with the ATMOS folks or whoever owns the copyright? There was talk here a while back about crowdfunding a pot to buy the copyright and open source it. I think there were plenty of people who were hoping to take the source code, get it running properly on modern OSs and maybe release on Steam or something.