Maelstrom

I also played many many hours of Maelstrom! That particular game is now open source [1]. On the whole, the main code of most games was not written by Ambrosia. There was a form on the website where you could submit a simple demo of a game idea you had. If Ambrosia thought it had potential then we would sign you up, to support the development, publishing and distribution. Ambrosia had a series of libraries, which were a mixture of C and Assembler, for graphics and sound etc. We had an in house graphic artist. And, of course, the shareware licensing code and mechanism. It was a great model. Coders with an idea could get support to take their game to the next level, and sell it etc. It all seems so easy now but the net was in its infancy then. We were mailing out CDs filled with the games. I never got my hands dirty of the game code, but I k

Funny you should ask, someone else linked the github repo of Maelstrom 3.0 SDL port! https://github.com/richardjs/maelstrom So, I'm not sure how much of the code is near-original Macintosh version code, and how much was revised/replaced to support SDL. Probably lots of original stuff though, surely.

It's not Escape Velocity, but Maelstrom was open-sourced [1]! A while ago I forked a version and changed the braking power-up to be controlled by a button press, instead of always active [2]. It was cool to fix something that always bugged me in a game I played when I was a kid. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maelstrom_(1992_video_game)#Le... [2] https://github.com/richardjs/maelstrom