Grotic

Grotic is Impression89's (Rene Bauer's) hex-grid arcade-puzzle game for the Macintosh, originally a 1995 shareware release with the v3.2 update mirrored to Info-Mac in two builds: grotic-32.hqx for 680x0 Macs and grotic-32-ppc.hqx for PowerPC. Macintosh Garden classifies it as an action puzzler in the Puzzle Bobble lineage.

How it plays

The author's pitch from the BinHex header: "A field of balls have to be cleaned up by various balls. You aim with the mouse and if there are more than two same balls they will disappear. You play against time and from level to level there are more various games." Mouse-driven aim, time pressure per level, and chains of three or more matching colours clearing from the field.

Hex grid heritage

Macintosh Garden notes the perspective explicitly as a hexagonal grid - the same playfield geometry Taito's Puzzle Bobble (Bust-a-Move) popularised in arcades from 1994 onward. Grotic adapts the formula to mouse aim on a colour Mac display, with multiple level variants rather than one infinite mode.

What v3.2 changed

The v3.2 release notes from the Info-Mac upload are short and direct: "better graphics and no bugs, clear scores, easier registration." The clear scoreboard reset and the simplified registration flow flag this as a maintenance release for an existing shareware base rather than a feature-driven new version.

This entry - the 68K build

This catalogue entry tracks the 68K build at info-mac/game/arc/grotic-32.hqx. The PowerPC-native build is mirrored separately as grotic-32-ppc.hqx (sibling node 10721). Earlier v2.0 (HyperCard-era, 640x480 / 256 colours / 1 MB RAM) was distributed via funet's general games tree as GROTICinstall.sit.hqx with a much shorter readme.

Provenance

Author Rene Bauer ("Impression89" / "Imp89"), University of Zurich, contact rebauer@studi.unizh.ch with bounce address rebauer@orc-studi.unizh.ch. Author homepage was www.unizh.ch/~imhof/rene/. Macintosh Garden mirrors the title at games/grotic with a single in-game screenshot dated 2021-08-08.