A game about sheep. Specifically, about what happens to them when an over-zealous government department tries to control the spread of a virulent disease.

MAFFia is a side-on arcade shooter in which a steady stream of sheep trots across the screen and you, armed with an inappropriate arsenal of handheld artillery, make sure that they can't spread the disease that they may not actually have to the other side. Hit sheep are flung into the air, and subsequent hits have the potential to blast them higher, and maybe even out of sight. Keep the sheep airborne and you are juggling. Thread one burst through several airborne sheep at once and you are chaining. Other bonuses are available. Gotta get them all.

It is cartoonish, gleefully tasteless, and much more addictive than it has any right to be.

This is a modernised build for Apple Silicon Macs, with an additional challenge and new graphics (although the classic look is still there, selectable in preferences). The original game, and everything that makes it good, is the work of William Reade.

What's new in this version

Native on Apple Silicon. Rebuilt to run natively on M-series Macs under current macOS.

Modernised code. The source has changed so much that it would be inappropriate to try to merge it back into William's original code, so version 2 has its own repository.

New graphics. The classic graphics remain available in preferences.

More challenge. Beware of the dogs!

Everything else, including the juggling, the chains and the bonus system, is William's original design.

How to play

Sheep enter from one side and try to reach the other. Shoot them before they do. Let too many escape and the game is over.

Juggling: each hit launches a sheep higher and in a new direction, depending on where you hit it. See how long you can keep one airborne.

Chains: hit several sheep with one stream of fire for multiplier bonuses.

Style bonuses: you are rewarded for late kills, long falls, height, repeated hits on the same sheep, and reducing a sheep to very small pieces. That last one also earns extra lives.

Weapons: heavier weapons fire slower and hit harder. Lighter weapons are better for juggling; heavier ones are better for ending the conversation.

At the end of each game you will get statistics on rounds fired, accuracy, favourite weapons and the combinations you managed.

Players at the time discovered their own meta-games: seeing how many consecutive hits they could land on a single sheep, or hoarding extra lives at the expense of score. Both remain highly recommended.

The original: William Reade, 2002

MAFFia was written by William Reade in the autumn of 2002 as an entry for uDevGame 2002, the second annual Macintosh game-programming contest run by iDevGames. The contest ran from 19 August to 17 November 2002 and produced around forty open-source Mac games. Only MAFFia featured sheep.

MAFFia is very much a game of its time. It is written in C against Apple's Carbon API, with QuickDraw-era graphics and a Project Builder project, which meant it could only run on early versions of Mac OS X. This port to Apple Silicon Macs changes very little of that, adding in only Pomme to provide an ersatz Carbon API.

William later reflected that the contest was what turned MAFFia from an idea into a finished game: the deadline gave him structure, and the prospect of a real audience pushed him to polish it further than he otherwise would have. The game was released as freeware, picked up warm reviews in the Mac press and community sites, and then, like most games of its era, quietly slipped out of reach as Macs moved away from Carbon and PowerPC.

The source code

In the late 2010s, William recovered the source (from an archived copy of the old Mac OS X release) and published it at github.com/fwereade/maffia. In doing so he replaced the game's original licence, which he felt had put off at least one person (me, Pascal Harris, 45RPM Software) who had wanted to update it, with The Unlicense, dedicating the code to the public domain specifically so that someone might one day bring it to modern Macs. That recovered source is believed to be version 1.0.1. The source for the later 1.0.2 release is, in William's words, lost; nobody now knows exactly what changed between the two. This version exists because of that decision. Thank you, William.

Credits

Original game, design, code and artwork: William Reade, 2002.
Apple Silicon update, additional gameplay and new graphics: Pascal Harris, 45RPM Software, 2026.
Carbon compatibility: Pomme, by Iliyas Jorio and contributors (licence).
Original release context: uDevGame 2002, organised by iDevGames.

This version is free and always will be. If you enjoy it, the original author is the person to thank.

A note on taste: no real sheep were harmed in the making of this game. Do not be tempted to try it at home.