Ambrosia Software's Ben Spees, Lead Programmer on the company's game known as Ragnarok, is leaving the company, according to Utterer.com. Spees noted in a forum thread on the company's web site (now deleted) that the future of Ragnarok is now unknown as he was the primary developer on the title. Update: Ambrosia Software President Andrew Welch tells games.macnn.com more about Spees' departure and the future of the Ragnarok engine...

Ben is indeed leaving Ambrosia, to work at a PC company on a PC-only
online role playing game -- unfortunately, he's not only leaving Ambrosia,
but also the Mac community. His talent will be missed.

We own the Ragnrok engine, and will be continuing to leverage it for a
number of upcoming projects; we hadn't announced anything because there
was no reason to announce anything. People leave companies all the time.

Ben saw an opportunity he was excited by, and he decided to go for it --
there's no grand conspiracy here. :)

We're also extremely excited by the upcoming projects we're working on:

Coldstone, Pillars of Garrendal (a game made with the Coldstone engine), Escape Velocity Nova, pop-pop, Deimos Rising, Ambrosia.net, Snapz Pro 2 for OS X.

...and a number of other interesting projects. No worries. :)

by MacNN Staff