Credits
The game
Escape Velocity was written by Matt Burch and published by Ambrosia Software, Rochester, New York, on 5 May 1996. Every ship name, planet description, mission briefing and line of quoted text on this site is theirs. The artwork is theirs. This site would not exist without it and claims none of it.
This is an unofficial fan archive with no connection to Ambrosia Software or its successors.
Where the images come from
Every ship sprite and outfit icon on this site was recovered from the original escape-velocity.com through the Internet Archive, and each one is listed with the capture it came from. The title screen on the front page is the game's own.
The hand-drawn galaxy map on the map page was made by ironyisntdead for GameFAQs. It is reproduced here with credit and is not our work; the author's signature was lifted out of the image only so the credit could live in text next to it, where it can be read, selected and linked.
The wordmark at the top of every page is not. It is a modern recreation of the Escape Velocity logo, generated rather than rescued, used because no clean copy of the original survives at a size a page header can use. It is called out here because the rest of this site rests on everything being traceable, and this one piece is not.
The people who kept it
- The Internet Archive. escape-velocity.com went dark years ago. Its 37 restored pages here exist only because the Wayback Machine kept crawling a site nobody was maintaining.
- Dave Vasilevsky, for evnova-utils — the tools that read EV's data files, and the resource dumps that every number on this site is built from. His Perl library also doubles as the only documentation of what half the fields mean.
- Amar Kishan, whose 2001 FAQ has settled every argument between our other two sources.
- ironyisntdead, for the hand-drawn galaxy map that confirmed ours was right.
- Macintosh Garden and the emulation community, for keeping a 1996 Macintosh application runnable today.
This site
Built with Eleventy. Plain HTML, one stylesheet, no build-time network access, no third-party anything, no ads and no trackers. The only JavaScript is on the Ship Registry, and it only folds records and compares ships — every figure is in the HTML whether it runs or not. Hosted on Neocities.
The colours are not a guess at the period: they are the ones the original site declared in its
own <body> tag — white on black, yellow links, and that particular green.