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Ambrosia Software games

Ambrosia Software was a Macintosh-only shareware company in Rochester, New York, founded by Andrew Welch. For most of the 1990s it made the games Mac owners actually argued about, and it made them in a recognisable way: take an idea that already worked, rebuild it properly for the Macintosh, and spend more care on the sound and the look than the genre needed. This page collects every Ambrosia title that runs here, in its original release, from Ambrosia's own installers.

The arcade games

Maelstrom (1992) is where it started: Asteroids, rebuilt with rendered rocks and a soundtrack that made a generation of Mac owners pay a shareware fee. The same instinct runs through the rest. Barrack is Qix. Swoop, by David Wareing, is the Galaxian family with rendered aliens and, in its own FAQ's words, even more frantic dodging. Wareing followed it with Mars Rising, a vertical shooter for the Power Mac with two-player Vac-Fighters over Mars, and wrote Bubble Trouble with Alex Metcalf: a small fish called Blinky in an underwater maze. Slithereens took the snake game into a stone maze, and Chiral, by Trevor Powell and Andrew Welch, is a puzzle game its own FAQ describes as atomic bonding crossed with Tetris.

Escape Velocity, and the bigger games

Escape Velocity (1996), written by Matt Burch, is the one people still talk about: a small ship, some credits and a galaxy you can trade in, fight over or pirate across, with no right way to play. EV Override (1998) made the universe five times bigger and added more than 250 missions. Both are here, complete.

The rest of the late catalogue went further in different directions. Ares, by Nathan Lamont, is real-time strategy in space where you fly one of the ships you command. Avara is a networked 3D tank game with a level editor its players used hard. Cythera is a role-playing game on an island full of people with their own business. Ferazel's Wand is a platform game with a wand and a lot of dark caves. Harry the Handsome Executive is a corporate office seen from above, where comfort and corporate favour are gauges on the screen.

How they are here

Ambrosia distributed everything as shareware and said why in its FAQ: it believed in electronic distribution, cutting out the middlemen, and letting people try a game before paying for it. Each game's licence file allows non-profit distribution as long as the software is unmodified and complete. That is the permission this site relies on, and it is followed literally: every copy is what Ambrosia's own installer wrote, and every "Please note that this is not a free product" notice is left exactly where it was. Click Not Yet and you are in.

The FAQ also mentions the office mascot, Hector the African Grey Parrot. You will find his name filling the unclaimed rows of Chiral's high-score table.

What is not here yet

EV Nova, Deimos Rising and Pillars of Garendall came later and need newer system software than this site's Mac OS 8.6 machine has; the work to run them is under way. Apeiron installs but does not yet display properly here, so it is not listed until it does.

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