A History Lesson
(From someone who was around and lucid Back In The Day)
(Some links courtesy of the Wayback Machine)
Vorinth was one of the first large plugins to be created, authored by a fellow named Jay Tingely. It was the contemporary as such works as The Visitor (which was cancelled and whose graphics survive on (url="http://"http://www.connect.ab.ca/~bsommerf/ships.html")Adam's Shipyard(/url), The Seed, (url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/dl-redirect.pl/FoundationPackage14.sit.hqx?path=ev/plugins&file;=FoundationPackage14.sit.hqx")Foundation(/url), and The Gap. He released a test flight, and excerpted a few dΓ«scs from it onto his website, which became near-canon before they were forgotten about. He also had a killer website that he never updated and was at the top of my bookmarks list for many months. He even acquired the shipyard/hail graphics of the original EV alien ships for the project from Matt Burch himself (he was more intractable in those days, and getting an e-mail back from him actually meant something).
It died twice, actually. The first time he got fed up with being flamed and pestered by a large fanbase, but he eventually picked it back up again. The second time it died, it died for good. He instructed all the beta testers (of whom Matthew Daily was one) to destroy their copies of it. A few leaked into circulation on Hotline and Carracho since then. I have a copy of b6, in addition to the Test Flight. The latest beta I ever heard about was b8, which was the first one with actual missions.
Having seen the thing in person for myself, I've got to confess that it would hardly be spectacular if it were released now. It was only really impressive back in the context of EV 1.0.0.
-----
This provides a convenient segue into the history of EV-site administration. To expound:
Jay Tingely created the "Unoficial Escape Velocity Web Site" at around the same time we worked on Vorinth. In fact, he advertised the plugin on there now and then, as a search through the Google archives of alt.games.mac.excape-velocity and comp.sys.mac.games.action will attest to. In those days, it competed with a rather uglier site called EV Central, which was never very good in my humble opinion (then again, history always favors with winners. But I get ahead of myself). As a historical footnote, Jay's site was hosted sequentially on Sasknet and then Globalnet.
Shortly after the release of EV 1.0.1, which I pulled off of a very early MacAddict CD, Jay put something up on his site called a "Web Board". When I was younger and in general more of a troll, I used to claim that I had made the first post to it, ever. This was a blatant lie, although I'm sure I saw Jay's original Welcome message. EV Central caught onto the trend and put their own up as well, but it was moderated poorly and declined into spam-babble much more quickly than Jay's. Eventually it died a quiet and unmourned death.
Towards the end of 1996, Ambrosia selected the two best fan sites for their latest games at the time, Avara and EV, and designated them the official sites. Jay's EV site move from globalnet.ca/ev to escape-velocity.com, where it stayed for the next four years or so. For the first while, there was some DNS confusion between escape-velocity.com and avara.com, but it eventually sorted itself out. The Wayback Machine can provide the first correctly archived escape-velocity.com page from 4 July 1998 (url="http://"http://www.escape-velocity.com/archives/search.html")here(/url).
After Jay quit Vorinth the second time, he pretty much lost interest in EV and found a successor. Public consensus seems to be that his name was Geoff, and that he did exactly one update before being replaced yet again, although I confess to not remembering him half as well as his successor, Mason Sims, a.k.a. "Ice" of Ice's Plugin Review Page.
In gentle words, Mason was posessed of a rather healthy sized ego. He was also on a power trip, and had a bit of Mom complex. I also happened to hate and fear him, but that was because I got into a flame war with him a few months before he ascended to the throne (give me a break, I was 12.) He ruled the board with what I considered to be an iron fist at the time, but in hindsight realize was just him trying to do his damned job in spite of us idiots (a lesson taught to me by my brief stint as grand poobah of Mark Loganbach's (url="http://"http://www.uevorpg.f2s.com/index2.htm")uEVO RPG(/url) but once again, I digress). Mason had a habit of deleting literally any post that was not directly related to EV itself. Since we didn't have a separate board for friendly spam like "Banter & Brawl" in those days, you can imagine that this was a bit of an issue. He eventually saw the need to isolate himself from the masses, who had grown to loathe him, and elected to delegate.
He selected three sub-admins. Charlie Grover was the mail admin, and certainly the most durable of the three (He lasted through at least three different leaderships). Oren Kwiatek was a fool who fancied himself a graphics designer, and had responsibilty for keeping the site updated, which he didn't take very seriously as far as any of us could tell. The most notable of the gaggle was a guy named Evan Priestley (or Skyhawk, or Mithril Echo, or whatever he's calling himself these days). At the time, Evan had just released his masterpiece, Final Battle, which had some pretty bitching graphics from the time, but was absolutely bug-filled. The current version is 4.1, maintained by WickedDyno (formerly Scienta Claus, the Lord of Lemmings), and it's still got issues. He had much better rapport with the board community than Mason could ever have dreamed of, and was very well liked for the majority of his tenure.
I found myself working on FBII after I met him in an HTML chat hangout we had called the Galaxy Bar (this is where I got the "Suluger" variation on my handle, where I met Gareth Sparks who wrote Dash Riprock, and where Kevin M. Boots, author of the eternally damned and/or in limbo project New Republic and later host of the Hotline Server "Starlight", found love and lost it for the first time with a 26 year old girl who went by "Mouse".) We held our "top-secret" development meetings there, back when the team was small, but eventually we got too many ideas, too many people, our heads swelled, we decided the EV plotline was a hindrance (thus the project severed its roots with the EV aliens, invented a crappy plot device involving oil wars and bio-mechanical foot soliders and was rechristened "Xenocide") and that we were too good for the EV/O engine (at which point we decided, in a fit of pomposity, to write our own because obviously EV3 was never going to happen, thus spawning Project psilon, which is spelled with a Sigma because it looked nifty and we didn't know Greek. Eventually Evan found other projects (I believe he's currently working on an RPG called Aeon, although he may have quit that) and his team lost interest. The plot sucked, anyway, and I was responsible for half of it. You try writing something coherent while a hairbrained egotist is micromanaging you. My other project that will never see the light of day, "Future's End" was always much better.
Back to the main plotline: Eventually Mason decided to pull rank again because he was feeling marginalized (which he was) and wanted power back (which he'd given up) so he changed all the administrative passwords and left on a vacation. Evan was the only really active admin left at that point (Oren was a flake and Charlie was terribly proactive), so he and a few higher-ups in EV mailed Ambrosia and clicked the metaphorical "request assistance" button in the comm dialogue (I think the metaphor police are probably going to shoot me for that one.) We got "Cajun" David Richards to intervene for us, who manned the site for a short period of time while Ambrosia went Admin hunting. They settled on a little known guy named Jos Delbar, a.k.a. laer.
Jos was a veteran from long ago, having worked on the afforementioned Visitor plug (he was story, Adam was graphics. Jos was the one who bailed, causing Adam to offer up the graphics in his shipyard) and been a bit of a lurker for some time. He retained Charlie Grover and Evan has his subordinates, and for a good long while, all was nice. Jos wrote new webboard scripts with login features and IP tracking, and life was good. Evan sort of stopped adminning around this point, but nobody really cared. What caused him to leave eventually wasn't FB2, or Xenocide, or Project psilon. It was far more petty than that. When EVO came out, Jos and Ambrosia set up a new webboard for the new game. Instead of delegating the adminstration of it to Evan, he handled it directly himself. Evan felt cut out and redundant, and eventually decided to quit.
We held elections for a new WebBoard admin. Erik Sogn, a.k.a. HellHunter, won handily, and gained a reputation as the most sex-crazy adminstrator ever. I was good friends with him for most of my Freshman year, and can attest to this with some regret. Talking to him was like getting your "plugin" anal raped by Ben Chess' delightful EV-Edit, in the worst possible way. He was also well liked, but wasn't much of an adminstrator. Jos co-officiated with him on matters Boardwise.
Jos was caught pirating Mars Rising some time after this. Andrew Welch was not pleased and revoked his administrative priveleges. Most of us were incenced, and Erik campaigned vigorously for him, but it was to no avail. David Dunham, having replaced Cajun by this point, stepped in and arbitrated while Andrew hunted for a new Admin again, the same way he had immediatly before Jos' tenure. They eventually settled on Mark Loganbach, or Captain Scurvy, who led the site through a drastic redesign that was actually very good, although it destroyed the last vestiges of Jay's original plan. The whole thing was rendered moot, though, when the sites were merged into Ambrosia Software's website a few month's later and Jos' discboards were replaced by the Infopop UBB we all know and love.
----
As far as Dash Riprock goes, I remain good friends with Gareth Sparks, after meeting him on the Galaxy Bar a few years back. We met in person last summer under somewhat strange conditions (what I was doing in the suburbs of Washington D.C. instead of my native land of the ever-rainy Pacific Northwest, I'll leave to your imaginations). I always admired his stories, but I've caught up to him in terms of writing ability since the, and he looks back on Dash Riprock with no small degree of embarassment these days. It was comparativly good when it was written, but I think most of that can be attributed to the fact that Gareth was the only person writing EV serials who seemed to have any real grasp of the English language.
-----
Footnote: Adam Sommerfield, who worked with Jos Delbar on The Visitor, as mentioned a few times above, also collaborated with Kristoffer "toffe" Andsen of the Escape Velocity Game Expander in the very first failed attempt at a sort of massivly multiplayer version of EV. It fizzled, of course, but I still have the old development documents (ie, daydreams) from Ambassador/Arkon software lying around on my hard drive.
-reg
