As internet often does, I found myself reconnected with an old friend the other day. On instagram, Paul Evans, or as I once knew him ‘Hudson’ posted a self-published artbook and I knew I just had to have it. In the order form I asked him to sign the book, thanked him, and signed the message with my old internet Moniker from the early 2000’s - ‘Admiral Zombat.’
Admiral Zombat was the webboard name that I chose for Ambrosia Software’s webforums, and would become the first alias that I would use in online communities. As the name of this journal and my artstation would suggest, ‘Zombat’ (a middle-schooler’s idea for what one would call a genetically enhanced, superintelligent wombat) stuck, which might indicate the gravitas of what this particular community would provide for me. In the 90s Apple computers had a pitiful amount of games compared with their PC counterparts, and the main way that new games were promoted - at least from my perspective - was via Shareware. My Brother had a subscription to ‘Mac Addict’ which sent along a CD filled with shareware with its monthly volume. He and I would eagerly pop the CD into our old Quadra 610 my dad had ferreted home from his job after school and have between 7 and 20 games to peruse and go through. Most of them were probably hobby projects from college-aged developers, like Meat Gone Bad - a hotdog and hamburger themed re-skin of Galaga, sidescrollers like Kung-Fu Chivalry, or even weirder, Billy goes Bowling. Another notable was the Absurdist ‘Regan’s Watching’ which was just a picture of president Reagan, whose eyes would follow your cursor, until your cursor was over him at which point you’d hear soundbites of him denying or not recalling. I think MacAddict had this listed as a ‘game?’ Fantastic.
Some of these I’d spend hours playing, because they were quite good, others hours of playtime because I was just so bored. But then Escape Velocity (EV for short) came out, which compared to the earlier game from Ambrosia Software, Malestrom, seemed quite boring. Instead of flying around in a cool fighter ship blasting asteroids, you were in what appeared to be a milk carton without weapons. But shortly before quitting the game in boredom I found myself in the midst of a pirate-fed battle, watching two massive titan ships fight it out. Having spent my money on a single laser blaster, after the fight was over, and noticing the low shields of the Fed Destroyer, my brave little toaster of a space can decided to open fire. The resulting battle was a lot shorter than I had anticipated, and I blew up.
Naturally, I was undaunted and hours and hours of play later, I was blowing these fed destroyers up in my sleek kestrel, or even later, I somehow managed to disable and board an alien fighter, which was pretty much the best ship in the game - low health but fast with an absurd shield regeneration speed. Cackling, I spent hours just attacking and often destroying anything that came into a system, not caring which systems I pissed off in the process - it was a precursor to those times playing Grand Theft Auto when the goal was to cause as much mayhem and see how long you survive. For a young adolescent boy, it was heaven.
Around this time too, I had taken an interest in computer-generated 3D modeling, after my brother had shown me some of his experiments, I got hooked on Specular Infini-D, the program that was used to make the ships for Escape Velocity. I learned that people were actually developing plug-ins for this game, putting their own ships into it and modifying it, which brings me back to the Ambrosia Software Web boards. A budding community of EV enthusiasts and my favorite - artists. The EV Image gallery was where I would learn tips and tricks for making my renders look good, a place of friendly competition and critique, and where I would meet Hudson, and a few other people who would later come together to work on a ‘Total Conversion’ plug-in known as ‘EVN Aftermath’ for the 3rd installment of the EV Games.
Hudson signed his beautiful art book as I requested, and it now has a place amongst my collection. Sadly, Aftermath would become vaporware and was never released, but the years that I spent working on it in my spare time, through high school, and even the early years of college were formative for the career in art and video game development that I would go on to take. Those that worked together on it - Hudson, Weepul884, Sparky, Ragashingo, Andcarne, BavarianCremePuff, Slav, Mrxak, Onyx, Rootbeer, Rawzer, Captain Skyblade enjoyed a sort of camaraderie that could have only existed in those golden, early years of the internet. As it happens, life drew us to different paths and most of my connections have since faded.
Having rekindled at least one of these connections in Hudson, however I find myself wondering about the rest of the crew, where they landed in life, and even wondering about my old work. I found the EV discord and subreddit, and found a small but dedicated group of people still keeping the EV torch alive. Out of curiosity I booted up my old college computer that has been kicking around for years, and lo and behold, found the original folder that I had used for The Aftermath.
Its been a wonderful trip down memory lane so far, going through the files, renders, and even some saved messages from the project, even importing some of my old lightwave objects into blender and seeing the nascent modeling skills that I would go on to use professionally. I figure that since its been over 10 years, its safe to say that the project won’t ever be completed. As such, I figure it’s probably fine to release some of the work that I’ve done to the public, and provide a window into the most anticipated total conversion plugin that never was.
My file system for the project reflected my order and hygiene habits at the time, which was to say, atrocious, though, so short of just posting everything at once, I’d like to go through and curate everything a bit. So stay tuned!
In the meantime, here are 3 Neo-Federation ships I imported into blender the other day:
And how one of them looked in game:
and the other's Shipyard description image:
More to come!
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