Escape Velocity (1996)

Ambrosia Software, Rochester NY, May 5th 1996. Written by Matt Burch, who was still at university. Shareware, Macintosh only, 68k and PowerPC. A galaxy of 108 star systems, 107 places to land, 27 ships and a civil war nobody is winning.

What is in here

A knowledge base rather than a walkthrough: everything below is derived from the game's own resource files and cross-checked against Ambrosia's guides, so it answers questions instead of telling you what to do next. It comes in four layers, and the first time through they are worth reading in this order.

Before you leave the ground

If you have never flown this game, start here and nowhere else. Everything after it assumes you know what a jump is and why you are broke.

• New Pilot's Guide — your first hours: Levo, ten thousand credits, a Shuttlecraft, and the one decision you should put off as long as possible. Where the early money is, and what to bolt on before anything else.

What there is

Five registers, one for each kind of thing the galaxy is made of. They are the same shape on purpose — one row per thing, grouped, with the full record folding out underneath — and they are wired to each other, so a weapon knows which worlds sell it and a world knows which missions it hands out. Follow a link and the search arrives already made.

• Ship Registry 27 hulls — every hull with its rescued sprite and its full record, and any four of them side by side in a comparison that reads the table rather than keeping a second copy of the numbers.
• Outfits and Arsenal 53 outfits · 25 weapons — everything you can bolt on, in seven tables because a sensor and a cannon do not compare against each other. A weapon is not something you buy — you buy the outfit that mounts it — so each thing appears exactly once.
• The Galaxy 108 systems · 107 worlds — the map, the systems and every world inside them on one page. It also answers the question no fan guide ever has: what each shop actually stocks. The game never stored that as a list; it falls out of a rule with two halves, and the second half is why the Kestrel is only ever sold at Blackthorne.
• Missions and the War 109 missions — the factions that hand out work, and every storyline in the order you actually play it. That order is not copied from a walkthrough: one mission sets a control flag and the next requires it, so the chain is read out of the graph. Including the two courier runs that quietly close half the game.
• Notable Captains 190 names — the ships that are not anonymous. What each one flies, how the engine arms them — which is not the standard fit for that hull, and is why the Rapier that would not die was not a stock Rapier — and which of them do not exist until a mission puts them in the sky.

How any of it pays off

The registers tell you what exists. This tells you what to do with it, and almost none of it is written down anywhere in the game.

• How a Pilot Grows — one ladder with four rungs: your first million, making a name, taking ships you could never have bought, and a checkbox that makes all of it count. Then the shortcuts, including the two bugs that hand you free ships.

The game itself, and where it came from

A 1996 Macintosh application and the website that sold it. Both are still reachable, one way or another.

• Play It Today — how to actually run it now, on a Mac, on Windows or on Linux through Wine, including the route that skips emulation entirely by running this galaxy on the EV Nova engine.
• The Ambrosia Archive 37 pages — escape-velocity.com as it stood between 1996 and 1999, restored page by page with its own HTML and its rescued images. Everything else here is rewritten in our own voice; this is the one place that is not.