Ares is a video game created by Nathan Lamont of Bigger Planet Software, and released in 1996, without much success due to poor marketing on the part of the game's original publisher, Changeling Software, which did not award Nathan Lamont any profit from the sales of the game. Changeling became defunct in 1998.

The game was later released as shareware by Ambrosia Software

Ambrosia Software

Ambrosia Software is a predominantly Macintosh software company located in Rochester, New York. Ambrosia produces utilities and games. Its products are distributed as shareware; demo versions can be downloaded and used for up to 30 days....

. Here, it reached its peak in the late 1990s, thanks to Ambrosia's marketing efforts. The key feature of the game was its ability to zoom in and out smoothly; this allowed the player to switch between a close-up view, which emphasized space combat skills, and a strategic

Strategy

Strategy, a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. In military usage strategy is distinct from tactics, which are concerned with the conduct of an engagement, while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked...

 view of the entire map.

Story

The player is cast as the commander of the U.N.S. Apollo, humankind's first interstellar vessel, dispatched at light speed to investigate the source of a signal broadcast at Earth from one hundred and fifty light years away. On reaching the source, the crew is told that, due to relativistic effects, Earth has by now been taken over by the religious Cantharan Order, and the signal was a ruse from the friendly Ishiman, who wished to maintain humanity as a free race; the Ishiman planned to find a new world for the crew of the Apollo. Although the advanced but peaceful Ishiman are unwilling to enter into direct war with the Cantharans, the Apollos crew is able to persuade them to supply a limited amount of their technology in an attempt to free Earth. Upon undertaking their new mission, the ship is renamed the Ares.

Gameplay

Ares offered combat situations and strategic planning combined by allowing the player to directly control a single spaceship, at the same time as building and commanding others. Most players of Ares lingered around the GameRanger

GameRanger

GameRanger is an Internet gaming service for the Macintosh and Windows computing platforms. The service includes custom software and unlike other gaming services is not strictly web-based. GameRanger was created by Scott Kevill and was first released in July 1999 for Macintosh with support for 11...

 service, offered for free with the game as a way of connecting Macintosh

Macintosh

The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 computer users. Ares was never released for Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

.

Ares consisted of a saga between 6 main alien

Extraterrestrial life

Extraterrestrial life is defined as life that does not originate from Earth...

 species, with humans being one of the less advanced races in the universe

Universe

The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...

: the Audemedons, the Salrilians, the Ishimans, the Cantharan, the Gaitori and the Humans. There were however, numerous smaller species which come up throughout the solo play levels, such as the Obish, the Elejeetians, and the Bazidanese. These species were however not available for online play.

The single player game consisted of a story plot and 21 levels. When released as a shareware

Shareware

The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...

 game, Ares came with limited functionality and a was limited to the first six levels, giving the user a taste of the story, and incentive to register the game. Ares multiplayer mode set the Ares masters apart as the skill needed for winning against human opponents was higher, as the computer AI

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 was not very strong in the solo levels. Nonetheless, once the solo levels were completed, multiplay was where most users went.

In multiplayer 5 different game modes were available. Each game had with it a set of absolute strategies to use which usually worked–yet finding these strategies took time and adaptation. There was room for creativity, supreme piloting, or supreme strategy as well.

Ares left its imprint on the Macintosh Gaming League with its own page, organized by Ares supporters. Clan

Clan (computer gaming)

In computer and video gaming, a clan or guild is an organised group of players that regularly play together in a particular multiplayer games. These games range from groups of a few friends to 1000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members. The lifespan of a clan...

s were also found around Ares briefly. One of the oldest and highest ranking clan was called "TAG".

This game had a short, but sweet life with a revision of the game released roughly 3 years after its conception. The revision added a level editor named Hera, which allowed Ares levels to be edited and plugins to be made, similar to the plugins available for Ambrosia software's hit game Escape Velocity.

Current status and Modern Ports

As of 2008, the game is only compatible with Classic Mac OS system software, or run in the Classic environment in OS X. It cannot be run on Intel-based Macs, as these do not support the Classic Environment.

Using the Basilisk II

Basilisk II

Basilisk II is an open source software emulator which emulates the 680x0-based Apple Macintosh computer on a variety of operating systems, including BeOS, Linux, AmigaOS, Windows NT, Mac OS X and even on the Sony PSP....

 or Sheepshaver

SheepShaver

SheepShaver is an open source PowerPC Apple Macintosh emulator originally designed for BeOS and Linux. The name is a play on ShapeShifter, a Macintosh II emulator for AmigaOS , which is in turn not to be confused with a third-party preference pane for Mac OS X with the same name...

 Macintosh emulators, Ares can be run in single-player mode under most operating systems, including Windows and Linux.

The source code for Ares has been released, and there are two projects focusing on updating Ares to run on OS X and porting it to Windows. These projects are called Xsera

Xsera

Xsera is a port of Ambrosia Software's game Ares. It is being ported from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It is an open source project under the MIT License.-Story:...

, whose main website can be found here, and Antares

Antares

Antares is a red supergiant star in the Milky Way galaxy and the sixteenth brightest star in the nighttime sky . Along with Aldebaran, Spica, and Regulus it is one of the four brightest stars near the ecliptic...

, whose main website can be found here. Both projects have beta/alpha releases of their work available online.