About

History

Ares was written by Nathan Lamont of Bigger Planet for the classic Mac OS and was originally published by Changeling Software. Changeling Software went out of business while launching the game in 1998, and the game was later released as shareware by Ambrosia Software. Ambrosia saw through another generation of the game, including the release of a tool for creating plugins, called Hera, in 2001. However, following the release of Mac OS X, the game languished on the outdated Classic platform.

In November 2008, with the permission of Ambrosia, Nathan Lamont released the source code of the game as open-source software under the GNU General Public License 2.0, later expanded to provide the option of the GNU Lesser General Public License 3.0. In addition, much of the media was released under Creative Commons licenses. This led to the creation of two projects aiming to bring the Ares experience back: Xsera, a complete reimplementation which uses the original game as a reference, and Antares, which is a direct port of the old game.

• Version History
  • Ares 1.0 Demo
  • Ares 1.0.1 Demo
  • Ares 1.0
  • Ares 1.1.0
  • Ares 1.1.1
  • Ares 1.2.0

Open source release

The Ares source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License 2.0 and the GNU Lesser General Public License 3.0. This code forms the spiritual basis for Xsera, and is directly adapted in Antares.

The Ares media (text, images, sounds, and music) and Ares models (for most of the sprites and interface elements) are distributed separately from the game engine and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Not all media from the original commercial distribution is included. Some sounds have been intentionally excluded.

In addition, the Ares movies are licensed under a more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Also available: the Hera source code, game data editor for Ares. Most of the Hera source files have been dedicated to the public domain.

This Site

Except where otherwise noted, text on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Downloads, images, and video are under varying licenses. This site was written using Pelican and incorporates the extension pelican_youtube, by Kura.