Cell-ebrating Ammo the Amoeba

When I began working at Rogue Amoeba in 2015, the company’s mascot Ammo the Amoeba was front and centre on our website. He served as the logo, and sat in the site navigation at the top of every single page.

Our website circa 2014, featuring a very prominent, and violent, Ammo

The next year, we introduced our more subtle current logo as part of a rebranding and Ammo took a step back from the limelight. Even though he is no longer seen on every page of our site, Ammo hasn’t gone away entirely. As readers of this blog or our mailing list may recognize, he continues to pop up in various forms. He’s also served a role on the 404 error page that appears if you try to visit a page on our site which doesn’t exist.

Over the years, I’ve had fun making many iterations of Ammo:

Rockstar Ammo for our 20th anniversary in 2022

Spooky Halloween Ammo

Relaxing in his hammock

Ammo is also alluded to frequently in our documentation, in the form of “Ammo’s <Device>” in documentation screenshots. In fact, I was using the name so much when taking screenshots that I literally just changed the names of my own devices. Now, my main Mac and iPhone are called “Ammo’s Mac” and “Ammo’s Phone”, respectively. That’s only a little ridiculous.

The truly eagle-eyed might even have noticed the appearance of the name “Ammette” in a few spots in our documentation. She’s quite rare, but she has been pictured at least once. You’ll have to find that yourself.

One of my personal favourite forms of Ammo is the real-world plush version created way back in 2005. My gigantic 90-pound Bernese mountain dog Aji usually tears apart dog toys in seconds, with a ferocity matched only by his love of pie. When it comes to Ammo, however, he must understand how much the plushie means to me. Aji gently carries it around like a little baby, slobbery but otherwise unharmed.

Aji with his baby ‘Mo’

With Ammo appearing in so many different fun forms, we thought it would be neat to collect as many of them as we could find and put them into a single gallery. That’s now a special exhibition in our Historic Screenshot Archive. To check out all the amoeba-y goodness that is our mascot Ammo, click the priceless works of art below: