Classic: Mantra

By: Derek Yu

On: June 3rd, 2009

Ted Martens showing the Mac some love:

Mantra, a Mac freeware game by the Syzygy Cult released in the mid-90’s. It was a fun Zelda-style game with really good music.

There’s no download for Mantra, or Mantra 2, its sequel, on the author’s site anymore (or really much mention of them), but you can get them both here. Unfortunately, the games will only run on OS 9 and Intel-based Macs like my Macbook Pro don’t support the Classic environment. Would someone with an old Mac or an emulator kindly take some screenshots of the two games so that I can add them to the database?

From snooping around it sounds like it was a fairly well-regarded game back in the day, but for the life of me, I cannot find a single screen online.

Update: Thanks very much to Ben Donatelli for the screenshots!

TIGdb: Entry for Mantra

Posted in Action, Freeware, Macintosh | Tags: SygyzyCult

Duckmeister

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6324.msg208920#msg208920

ahem ahem
FriendGaru

I remember playing the first one way back when. Had some weird bugs. I remember being able to attack locked doors to death, allowing one to bypass large swaths of the game. Fun game, though.
TabbyCat

I loved this game! Thanks for getting the word out, there is a treasure trove of wonderful old Mac games that deserve recognition. It was something of a golden age for indie developers who put out tons of simple, fun, and creative games at the time (from around 89′ – 95′).

I strongly encourage everyone to check this game out, Glider Pro:
http://macintoshgarden.org/games/glider-pro
LordRolo

This has every right to be here, epic gameplay, epic story line, epic everything, although this was a game i used to play when i was about 8-9 so it is EXTREAMLY fondly remembed almost as much as Indiana jones and the fate of atlantis
http://ravuya.com ravuya

It would be nice if the Storm Impact guys opened up Taskmaker to the community or found their old code. The Prince of Destruction/MARS guys have apparently given their code to someone else who hasn’t yet done a port job.

There’s a lot of old Mac games that could do with a freshening up and redistribution – there was really a golden age like TabbyCat said. Fantastic stuff with remarkably high production and polish values.
http://ravuya.com ravuya

Hrm, my mistake – the PoD/MARS guys have NOT given out their code. I confused them with the Realmz port, which doesn’t seem to be progressing very fast.

However, if the guy who did MARS is reading this, I can make ports happen. Let me know. :)
Ted Martens

Thanks for posting that. I looked for a long time and couldn’t find a screenshot either, thanks Ben Donatelli where did you find that?

@TabbyCat: Glider Pro was seriously an awesome awesome game. If there is time and space, it deserves some mac love too.

…I just said “time and space” in the context of blog real estate, hah!
Golds

Oh man, Mantra is awesome. Memories!
Ben Donatelli

@Ted Martens: dusted off my trusty Basilisk emulator and took some screenshots directly from the games. PrtScrn + Photoshop ftw
Finn

I loved this game.

Some other awesome games that I played excessively:
-Escape Velocity
-Apeiron
-Exile
-All Ray Dunakin’s games
(http://www.semitech.com/marc/ray.html)
(http://raydunakin.com/Site/Welcome.html)
Guest

OS X and Windows versions have been released!

http://www.syzygycult.com/