Quark

Quark is a freeware action-puzzle "think-shoot-them-escape" game by Jean Bovet (Curvus Pro), released as version 2.0 around the early 2000s. This Mactrove entry corresponds to the Mac OS X build (quark-20-osx.hqx); a sibling node (quark, nid 11200) holds the parallel OS 9 build. Players battle through rooms of intelligent bugs and hostile humans to escape an electronic world.

Same game, two runtimes

Quark 2.0 was uploaded to Info-Mac in two parallel packages: an OS 9 PowerPC build and a Mac OS X build. Both share Bovet's identical author abstract and identical feature set; the duplicate Mactrove listing reflects the two distinct downloads as preserved by Info-Mac. If you only need one, pick the build that matches your runtime.

Gameplay and design

The action layer is a top-down arena shooter; the puzzle layer is figuring out how the level's enemies behave and what sequence of actions clears the room. Bovet's framing as "think-shoot-them-escape" sets it apart from pure twitch arcade games of the era.

Level editor

A built-in level editor ships with the game. Players can author and play unlimited custom levels; Bovet invited authors to email him their .lvl files for possible inclusion (with edits) in future versions of Quark, making this one of the more openly community-extensible Mac shareware action games of its time.

Provenance

Mirrored from Info-Mac's game/ directory. Original distribution page was curvuspro.ch/quark, now offline. The version 1.0 release of this same game survives in the Macintosh Repository archive. Note that the unrelated game called "Quark" on Macintosh Garden (Spencer Seidel, 1996, an asteroids/Maelstrom variant) is a different title entirely.