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A short history of Avara
See the 20th Anniversary stream by ScarletSwordfish to see the original game being played and examined in detail!
Avara's beginnings date back to 1992. Juri Munkki, an interactive media design student at Helsinki University of Technology, was interested in 3D computer graphics. He first wrote a rendering library in late 1992 with the Apple Macintosh.
In 1994, Munkki met with several other game developers, and put together a demo of a BSP library for the Macintosh. Binary space partitioning is one way to organize 3D data and properly sort it for display on the screen. Part of the demo was driving around custom scenery built from this BSP data. For context, this was two years before Quake was released, and a cutting edge use of the hardware available at the time.
Several developers were interested in his demo. Munkki wrote more experiments to show other developers and publishers, one included a Battlezone-type tank game.
Juri posted a demo of his networked multiplayer tank game to to the comp.sys.mac.games mailing list in 1995. In his attempt to reach other shareware/freeware developers, he got in touch with Andrew Welch of Ambrosia Software, who became the publisher for Avara.
Welch was interested in online multiplayer games as well. He encouraged Juri to make the game playable over the network, and Juri was able to hack this together in the span of a few weeks early in 1996, eventually improving it to the point of being able to play a trans-Atlantic game with Andrew via modem, and wrote a paper on designing networked multiplayer games in 1997.
Quite unfortunately, Ambrosia's 1996 release of Avara was not successful shareware. The number of licenses Ambrosia sold likely number in the hundreds. Few people know of Avara even today, as the Macintosh specific gaming community was already niche, and Avara was quickly overshadowed within Ambrosia's own marketing by their more successful titles.
Juri and many others played often for a couple of years. A small community of dedicated fans held on to the game for much longer. Around 2001, there were several active forums, level design communities, guilds, and a ladder that was active until 2003. There were even Hotline servers dedicated to Avara, one of which eventually became the Avaraline community.
It was around this time that Mac OS X was released. Avara was technically supported under the Classic emulation environment, but only barely--certain mouse code simply did not work the same, and greatly hindered gameplay. Ambrosia released a point update to the game, an attempt at fixing some of the issues with Classic emulation.
This massively shrunk the small community as players steadily upgraded their computers and were unable to run the game. After Mac OS X 10.4.11, the Classic environment was removed, and third party software was required to emulate a Mac OS 9 environment.
From 2005 onward, the game rarely saw more than a few players online at any single moment. Small groups of folks willing to retain Apple hardware capable of running Mac OS 9 kept Avara alive for as long as they could.
By 2015, it was clear that Ambrosia Software experienced some trouble. Their main forum and several other parts of their website went offline. The official Avara tracker, which was pretty much the only way to meet other players online, was taken down.
Some time later Avaraline reached out to Juri asking for a copy of the source of the game. Juri was able to get clearance from Andrew to release the source code and posted it on Github in late 2017.
Our small group had already been attempting to rewrite the game for modern systems since around 2010. With the original source and clearance from ASW, Avaraline's Dan Watson was able to port the game to modern C++ and get it running using SDL.
Now that the game can run on modern computers, Avaraline is trying to reconnect with as many of the old Avara fans as possible, to let them know that 25 years later, one of their favorite games lives on (and even plays on Windows/Linux)! At the same time, we hope to bring some baseline improvements to the way Avara plays and invite new players to join us.