Maelstrom is an early-nineties update of Asteroids with improved graphics and interface. It was created by Andrew Welch, president of Ambrosia Software and led to the creation of the formation of the company. Many of Ambrosia's subsequent shareware titles followed in a similar formula.
At the time of its release, Maelstrom took full advantage of the Macintosh's multi-media capabilities and broke ground for further developments of the platform in the "anti-productivity software" arena. While quaint by today's standards, Maelstrom is still enjoyed by many players and for a large group of people was the first Macintosh game they played. In 1993, Maelstrom received the Shareware Industry Aware for Best Macintosh Game. It was created using THINK C and uses 18,000 lines of C code with 9,000 lines of inline assembler.
More recently, Ambrosia Software gave the source-code away to one Sam Lantings , who created a GPL port that runs on many Operating Systems, such as Linux and Mac OS X.
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