Dark Corona Pegasus

Dark Corona Pegasus is a 1997 vertically scrolling space shooter developed by Algomedia Software and distributed for Classic Mac OS as $17 shareware. The player flies a single fighter through sixteen levels of pirates, rebels and capital-ship bosses on a campaign to stop Emperor Keldor of Morag from activating the planet-killing Iconia Device.

Mission and arcade play

Each stage is a top-down scrolling shoot-em-up: waves of enemy ships drift in from the top of the screen while the player weaves between bullet patterns and trades fire with a heavily armed boss at the end. A second mode opens up free-flight space sections that play closer to Asteroids or Sinistar, swapping fixed scrolling for inertia-driven combat against drifting freighters and rebel squadrons.

Upgrades and the in-game shop

Gold dropped by destroyed enemies funds a between-mission shop where the Pegasus fighter can be re-armed - rockets, beam lasers, shields and other systems are all paid upgrades. Players can also choose to skip directly between planets or fly the inter-mission legs manually, picking up extra encounters and salvage at the cost of fuel and risk.

Production and distribution

The Mac build runs as a fat binary for 68k and PowerPC under System 7.5.3 through Mac OS 9 and was published in different SKUs (a 1.94 MB StuffIt download and a 3.35 MB CD ISO) by Midas Interactive alongside the original Algomedia release. The game is best remembered for a relatively polished 16-bit-style art set and roughly half an hour of original arcade music for what was, at heart, a one-author shareware shooter.