Escape Velocity

An unofficial archive for Ambrosia Software's Escape Velocity — est. 1996

Welcome, pilot

The Escape Velocity title screen: a pilot on a hangar gantry watching Confederate and Rebel ships fight over a planet.
The title screen, as it came up on a Macintosh in 1996.

On May 5th, 1996, Ambrosia Software released a shareware game for the Macintosh in which you start on a backwater planet called Levo, flying a cargo shuttle, with ten thousand credits to your name and no instructions about what to do next. There is a war on between the Confederation and the Rebellion. Nobody asks you to pick a side. You can spend the whole game hauling food between two planets and never fire a shot, and the game will let you.

That was Escape Velocity, written by Matt Burch. This is an archive of everything that is known about it: every ship, every star system, every planet, every mission thread — rebuilt from the game's own resource data and from the pages of the official site, which died years ago and had to be pulled back out of the Internet Archive.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on this site is traceable. The stats come from a dump of the game's own resource fork; the prose and the loadouts come from Ambrosia's own strategy guides, recovered from captures made in July 1998. Where the two disagree — and they do, in a handful of places — a third source breaks the tie and the decision is written down. Nothing here is guessed.

The three games

Start here