Quark

Quark is a freeware action-puzzle game by Jean Bovet of Curvus Pro, released as version 2.0 around the early 2000s. The author calls it a "think-shoot-them-escape" game: you face waves of intelligent bugs and hostile humans across rooms of an electronic world, figuring out how to escape each level alive. This Mactrove entry is the OS 9 build.

Gameplay

Each level is a self-contained puzzle-arena: enemies have behaviors that have to be reasoned about rather than simply outshot, and progressing past a screen often requires a particular sequence of actions rather than raw reflexes. The bugs and human antagonists are described as "intelligent" by the author, putting Quark closer to a thinking person's arcade game than a pure shooter.

Level editor and community content

A standout feature is the bundled level editor: players can build as many new levels as they want and play them locally. Bovet explicitly invited submissions, asking players to email him level files for possible inclusion in future versions of Quark, with the caveat that he might tweak them before bundling.

Versions and the duplicate listing

This Mactrove node corresponds to the OS 9 PowerPC build of Quark 2.0 (quark-20-os9.hqx). A separate Mactrove entry (slug quark-0) covers the parallel Mac OS X build (quark-20-osx.hqx). The two are the same game, packaged for the two parallel runtime targets at the OS 9 / OS X transition.

Provenance

Mirrored from Info-Mac's game/ directory. Author Jean Bovet directed Mac users to the now-offline curvuspro.ch/quark page for additional information and downloads. Note: Macintosh Garden's games/quark page is for an unrelated 1996 asteroids/Maelstrom-like game by Spencer Seidel and is not the same title.