Ambrosia Software

» see ambrosiasw.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ambrosia was Macintosh-only at a moment when that was a real wall. Its catalog never crossed to Windows, which is where most of the world was, so an enormous number of people who lived through exactly these years have simply never heard of any of it. Andrew Welch founded the company on 18 August 1993 in Rochester, New York, a year after graduating from RIT and a year after writing the thing that started it.

That thing was Maelstrom, a 1992 remake of Asteroids with better art and a soundtrack, which circulated on bulletin boards and disks and did well enough to fund a company around it. Apeiron followed in 1995, a Centipede rework, then Swoop and Barrack and Bubble Trouble and the rest. The house style was consistent: take an arcade game everybody already knew, rebuild it properly for a Mac, then charge twenty dollars for it.

The one that outgrew the formula was Escape Velocity in 1996. It was an open-ended space trading and combat game, top-down, with a galaxy you could roam freely and a plot you were welcome to ignore for as long as you liked. It had a plug-in architecture, so players built their own galaxies and total conversions and swapped them for years. Escape Velocity Override came in 1998 and Escape Velocity Nova in 2002, and Nova still has people playing it.

~ the case file ~

~ the bargain ~

What people who were there remember is the registration model. Shareware in the nineties usually meant a crippled build, with the later levels locked and saving disabled until you paid. Ambrosia shipped the whole program and let it work. After the trial ran out it showed you a screen telling you that you had not registered, and then it let you keep going.

The codes themselves became a small piece of Mac folklore. You emailed for one, and the reply came with a licensee name that showed up in the program's about box. A generation of Mac users learned what software licensing was from a polite nag screen that could be dismissed forever and mostly was not, because the whole arrangement made you feel like a customer rather than a suspect.

~ the slide ~

Snapz Pro X kept the lights on longer than the games did. It was the screenshot and screen recording tool a large part of the Mac world used before the operating system got good enough at both, and for a long while it was the company's best seller.

The Mac App Store opened in January 2011 and quietly ended the model. Direct downloads and emailed registration codes stopped being how Mac software was bought, and a house built on a mailing list and a download page had nothing to convert into. In spring 2013 Ambrosia laid off nearly all of its roughly ten employees. Welch told MacRumors at the time that the company was still open and would keep selling and supporting its products, and for a few years that was even true, in a thinning sort of way. Releases came further apart and then stopped around 2016. By 2017 customers were posting publicly that purchases were not going through and that nobody was answering.

~ the last capture ~

The Internet Archive has ambrosiasw.com answering normally on 18 June 2019. From the start of July that year it returns nothing but redirects, and it has never come back. Wikipedia carries 19 July 2019 as the date the company became defunct, with a citation-needed tag that has sat on it since 2020, so this grave uses month precision and the last working capture as the anchor.

There was no announcement and no final sale. A company that had sold software by asking nicely for twenty-six years ended by letting something lapse, and the games are kept running now by the people who used to write plug-ins for them.

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