I remember during college in Rochester, NY I would drive by this unassuming house on Clinton Ave. Ambrosia Software said the sign out front. I recognized the name from some games about 10 years prior. I remember wondering what they were doing in a sleepy town like Rochester, when most important stuff seemed to happen out west or within a 5 hour drive south of there. But here was a place that had stuck with the home of Kodak and Xerox (yes, Xerox, and not that cool Palo Alto office). Offshoot of one of the nearby colleges?
I literally live right off of Clinton and pass that house every day going back and forth to work. I always thought it was great that one of my favorite Mac developers was so close.
Andrew Welch is a brother of Phi Delta Theta fraternity, NYH chapter, at the Rochester Institute of Technology (of which I am also a member.)
I purchased Uplink before I knew it was produced by a local, and joined the fraternity before I knew that one of the brothers had been involved to produce a game I liked. I am sorry to hear that they are closing up shop!
My girlfriend lives in Rochester near the Ambrosia Software house. I remember delighting in seeing the sign for the first time as it brought back memories of countless hours of Maelstrom games.
Sometimes I wonder what the software job market is like in Rochester these days.
I know that Rochester used to be a boom town (Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, probably others) and a place of cultural and moral significance (Frederick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony). It's a nice place, and I spent 4 years there. But it's definitely a place in decline. The same way that Detroit was a boom town and now is not. If I made a similar sideshow saying "You're welcome. -Detroit", would that prove anything?
(It's also ironic that this slideshow assigns Rochester the credit for the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Was it not corporate HQ in Rochester who made the bad decisions not to do more to productize those gains?)
