When I was a kid, we didn’t have videogames in our house. No NES, no Sega, no Game Boy. It wasn’t until late in the SNES cycle that I weeded enough yards to pick up an SNES, and the world finally opened up in front of me. I rented Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III, racked up massive late charges, and the rest is history. But what we did have was a Apple Performa 6116CD – perhaps the worst gaming machine on the planet, excluding the Apple Pippin. The 60mhz PowerPC 601 and 8 MB of RAM could barely power a QuickTime movie, let alone Marathon. But there were people out there who knew exactly what this biege, Gil Amelio-era monstrosity was capable of.
If you had a Mac in the ’90s, you know what I’m headed for. While the PC side had id and Epic to keep them company, those of us who cruised around on Performas and LCIIIs know the real masterminds of ’90s shareware: Mac publisher extraordinaire Ambrosia Software. Ambrosia’s still around today, and making absolutely necessary utilities (and a game, here and there) for Mac OS X and the iPhone. They’re certainly one of the longest-running and most successful shareware publishers, even in this era of swapped serial numbers and open source.
But in the ’90s, they were first and foremost a game publisher. Apieron, Maelstrom, Avara, Barrack, Swoop - just a few of the names that will bring a smile to the face of anyone who played Mac games back in the day. Ambrosia staked their claim on arcade-y games, based on familiar game mechanics with unique and charming twists, and an undeniable and charming sense of humor. Their house style was immaculate, and nothing came out until it was immaculately polished – think of their supposed Quake-killer, Manse, a survival horror FPS that lived screenshot to screenshot for years until it was finally canned, looking better than the vast majority of shovelware on the PC side.
Escape Velocity, though, was a masterpiece, a piece of intelligent and complicated gameplay with a depth completely unheard of in the shareware world.
How Escape Velocity and its sequels shaped my appreciation of gaming, and what I think modern games have to learn from it, after the jump.