E-Maculation

Commentary on today's XKCD has led me to learn that, as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software , Ambrosia's website apparently vanished last month – though as some have noted, it ceased to be properly functional for the purposes of software registration some time ago.

What could the future hold?

It will be interesting to see what happens. I'm sure there won't be anything official from Ambrosia in the future since Andrew Welch now does web development contracting via NYStudio107, and all the other Ambrosia folks have long since gone their own ways.

There's been some discussion at Macintosh Garden about preserving their old content, and I'm sure if Mac emulation were more user-friendly (or at least more distributable like DosBox), we'd see companies like GOG aiming to re-release them.

Because ASW was primarily a distributor, the main question will be what the original developers want to do with their games. It will depend on a game-by-game basis, but some of them have potential. For instance, Ben Spees is hoping to re-release Ferazel's Wand and Harry the Handsome Executive at some point. Avara and Ares have already been open-sourced by their creators. Just a few days ago, Peter Cartwright, who wrote the scenario content for Escape Velocity: Override, expressed a desire to keep the game available, although in that same thread one of the EV:Nova developers said he has no interest in re-releasing Nova.

Maelstrom is also open source. So is Aquaria, but that was never an Ambrosia exclusive so it hardly seems worth mentioning. (Same goes for the ports of Introversion's games.)

Aw, that's kind of sad. End of an era. Well, I suppose that era really did end five years ago... but you know what I mean.

The EV and EV:Override data format is well known; That is a series dear to my heart. I hope someone will write a new Nova-style engine from scratch that can handle all the scenarios.

Elyus wrote:For instance, Ben Spees is hoping to re-release Ferazel's Wand and Harry the Handsome Executive at some point.

I can't wait for those. Always wanted to replay (and finally finish) Harry.

It was such a great game.

I'm waiting for Harry to become a direct-to-streaming TV show.

Richard Moss just tweeted that he will be talking about Ambrosia at PAX Australia next month!

https://aus.paxsite.com/schedule/panel/ ... ac-legends