There's a little blurb on MacObserver today, which will no doubt get some old time Mac gamers very excited:
So, anyone remember the old Mac shareware company Ambrosia Software? Well, a while back their website went down for good after a long period of basically not being in business at all anymore. Pretty sad, as Ambrosia used to be one of the major players in Mac gaming, especially in some of the darkest times in the Apple ecosystem. Unfortunately, they weren't able to adapt when Macs and iOS became popular, and Apple's own stores made a shareware publisher like Ambrosia obsolete.
One of Ambrosia's most legendary games, that truly defined Mac gaming in the late 90s, early 2000s, was a game called Escape Velocity Override. It was the second of three games in a series, the most recent being EV Nova, which ended up getting ported to Windows after an initial Mac release. This game was basically where I found my first online community, people I still, to this day, talk to on an ancient IRC channel, and a small handful of Discord servers. I met a bunch of them at Macworld in 2005. I met more traveling to PAX, and many other meet-ups since. The community around Ambrosia, and their games like EVO, was and still is awesome.
I still think about why it was that a game like EVO would have such a big impact on my life. It was a great game, where you got to fly around a pretty large and detailed galaxy as a space privateer, taking missions from various companies and governments, or simply going around shooting ships and stealing their cargo. It was a sandbox set in space with some surprisingly good story if you cared to play through it. If you weren't into story, you could just hone your combat skills, get bigger and better ships, and eventually conquer the whole galaxy yourself, collecting tribute from each dominated world.
I played a lot of great games in the 90s, though. What really made EVO special, and why it grew such a dedicated community around it, was the plug-ins. The game engine in the EV series, gaining some (or a lot of) new features with each iteration, was extremely moddable. Want to add a new ship or mission or weapon or whatever? You could do that quite easily, using a quirk of old Mac OS called Resource Forks and a program called ResEdit. You weren't limited to small changes, either. You could change the whole galaxy, tell completely new stories in a universe of your own creation, and even change a lot of the interface elements. The community built up around making and sharing these plug-ins. The best and biggest ones, "total conversions" became legendary. A lot of us kids playing the game ended up launching their careers based on some of these plug-ins. The EV community has quite a number of professional artists, writers, and programmers who credit EV, EVO, or EVN with getting them started.
Well, after Ambrosia officially closed shop recently, the publishing rights for Escape Velocity Override reverted back to its creators. One of those creators, Peter Cartwright (he designed the scenario) decided he wanted to re-release the game himself. The problem is, the old game has proprietary Ambrosia code in it for shareware registration, and the whole thing was made to run on Mac OS 7-9 era computers. It is possible to run the game in SheepShaver if you can find a copy, but for EVO to come back, it really needs a new modern engine built from the ground up. Well, he quickly got connected with a guy working on basically a clone of the EV engine, and tracked down any other parties with a legal interest in EVO. All those legal issues got resolved, and Peter Cartwright and his new partner Tom Hancocks who is making the new engine launched their kickstarter yesterday.
The game is getting renamed to Cosmic Frontier: Override for the re-release, but it's the same game made by the same guy, just remastered. It'll run on modern Macs, Windows, and even Linux computers. What's really exciting is they're working on backwards comparability with the original EV engines for things like plug-ins, with probably just a conversion tool at worst to get them working in the new engine. Tom Hancocks had already re-implemented a modern Resource Forks system before Peter Cartwright had even gotten in touch with him, as part of his Nova clone project. That said, he's also developing other tools so one won't need to deal with clunky old plug-in making tools like ResEdit anymore, and the new engine will also allow for things like Lua scripting. The new engine, they're calling Kestrel, will even be open-sourced after they release Cosmic Frontier: Override.
Anyway, at the time of this writing, they're at over 32% of funding after just one day. It's pretty exciting, but I think most of that so far is just people who played the original game and still are in contact with one another in the community. We've lost touch with many people since then (it has been 22 years, after all), so we're all trying to get the word out anywhere we think there might be some old Escape Velocity players lurking. I figured there's probably at least a few of you here. I also certainly think that there's many new folks that can be brought in, who never played the original. If you've ever played Endless Sky, it's this series of games that inspired it. Gameplay will have some differences, of course, if you are familiar with that game. There's been several space trader type games, but in my view, none of them are quite as polished or modifiable as the Escape Velocity series. None of them have the same amount of built-in additional content from a community that's been making plug-ins for them for decades, either, and I can guarantee there will be a bunch more new content added after CFO is released. I'll be one of the people making some of that content out of sheer love for this game.
‘Cosmic Frontier: Override’ is a Remake of 1998 Game ‘Escape Velocity’
A remake of Escape Velocity: Override is raising money on Kickstarter. Called Cosmic Frontier: Override, it’s the sci-fi game we love.
www.macobserver.com
So, anyone remember the old Mac shareware company Ambrosia Software? Well, a while back their website went down for good after a long period of basically not being in business at all anymore. Pretty sad, as Ambrosia used to be one of the major players in Mac gaming, especially in some of the darkest times in the Apple ecosystem. Unfortunately, they weren't able to adapt when Macs and iOS became popular, and Apple's own stores made a shareware publisher like Ambrosia obsolete.
One of Ambrosia's most legendary games, that truly defined Mac gaming in the late 90s, early 2000s, was a game called Escape Velocity Override. It was the second of three games in a series, the most recent being EV Nova, which ended up getting ported to Windows after an initial Mac release. This game was basically where I found my first online community, people I still, to this day, talk to on an ancient IRC channel, and a small handful of Discord servers. I met a bunch of them at Macworld in 2005. I met more traveling to PAX, and many other meet-ups since. The community around Ambrosia, and their games like EVO, was and still is awesome.
I still think about why it was that a game like EVO would have such a big impact on my life. It was a great game, where you got to fly around a pretty large and detailed galaxy as a space privateer, taking missions from various companies and governments, or simply going around shooting ships and stealing their cargo. It was a sandbox set in space with some surprisingly good story if you cared to play through it. If you weren't into story, you could just hone your combat skills, get bigger and better ships, and eventually conquer the whole galaxy yourself, collecting tribute from each dominated world.
I played a lot of great games in the 90s, though. What really made EVO special, and why it grew such a dedicated community around it, was the plug-ins. The game engine in the EV series, gaining some (or a lot of) new features with each iteration, was extremely moddable. Want to add a new ship or mission or weapon or whatever? You could do that quite easily, using a quirk of old Mac OS called Resource Forks and a program called ResEdit. You weren't limited to small changes, either. You could change the whole galaxy, tell completely new stories in a universe of your own creation, and even change a lot of the interface elements. The community built up around making and sharing these plug-ins. The best and biggest ones, "total conversions" became legendary. A lot of us kids playing the game ended up launching their careers based on some of these plug-ins. The EV community has quite a number of professional artists, writers, and programmers who credit EV, EVO, or EVN with getting them started.
Well, after Ambrosia officially closed shop recently, the publishing rights for Escape Velocity Override reverted back to its creators. One of those creators, Peter Cartwright (he designed the scenario) decided he wanted to re-release the game himself. The problem is, the old game has proprietary Ambrosia code in it for shareware registration, and the whole thing was made to run on Mac OS 7-9 era computers. It is possible to run the game in SheepShaver if you can find a copy, but for EVO to come back, it really needs a new modern engine built from the ground up. Well, he quickly got connected with a guy working on basically a clone of the EV engine, and tracked down any other parties with a legal interest in EVO. All those legal issues got resolved, and Peter Cartwright and his new partner Tom Hancocks who is making the new engine launched their kickstarter yesterday.
The game is getting renamed to Cosmic Frontier: Override for the re-release, but it's the same game made by the same guy, just remastered. It'll run on modern Macs, Windows, and even Linux computers. What's really exciting is they're working on backwards comparability with the original EV engines for things like plug-ins, with probably just a conversion tool at worst to get them working in the new engine. Tom Hancocks had already re-implemented a modern Resource Forks system before Peter Cartwright had even gotten in touch with him, as part of his Nova clone project. That said, he's also developing other tools so one won't need to deal with clunky old plug-in making tools like ResEdit anymore, and the new engine will also allow for things like Lua scripting. The new engine, they're calling Kestrel, will even be open-sourced after they release Cosmic Frontier: Override.
Anyway, at the time of this writing, they're at over 32% of funding after just one day. It's pretty exciting, but I think most of that so far is just people who played the original game and still are in contact with one another in the community. We've lost touch with many people since then (it has been 22 years, after all), so we're all trying to get the word out anywhere we think there might be some old Escape Velocity players lurking. I figured there's probably at least a few of you here. I also certainly think that there's many new folks that can be brought in, who never played the original. If you've ever played Endless Sky, it's this series of games that inspired it. Gameplay will have some differences, of course, if you are familiar with that game. There's been several space trader type games, but in my view, none of them are quite as polished or modifiable as the Escape Velocity series. None of them have the same amount of built-in additional content from a community that's been making plug-ins for them for decades, either, and I can guarantee there will be a bunch more new content added after CFO is released. I'll be one of the people making some of that content out of sheer love for this game.
