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Mac Gaming History Remembered
Thanks to 1UP/Ogamo for its feature discussing the early importance of the Apple Macintosh as a videogaming platform. The author argues: "The Mac definitely left its mark on gaming. Though it never became a gaming powerhouse, it played host to a few legitimate classics, and their ideas went on to influence developers to this day", before referencing titles such as ICOM's Deja Vu ("...has some of the wry sense of humor that [also] brightened up the best of Infocom's games") and Silicon Beach's Dark Castle ("One of the first successful action games to use a mouse for shooting things.")
Two words:
Armour Alley
Like all great games: simple to get into, difficult to master.
Funtage Factor: Purple
Was the First Color game I had ever played
and argueably the best graphics (to that point)
Also it had 8 bit sound, not 1 bit.
I always thought of Creationism as the Raving Right's version of the Loony Left's Anthropogenic Global Warming-brightmal
Both I and my carpal-tunnel-crippled hand respectfully disagree.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
BOLO!
http://www.lgm.com/bolo/
or if your a Windows/Linux user:
http://www.winbolo.com/
Since Bungie was only mentioned at the end of the article, and Ambrosia wasn't mentioned at all, even though they are responsible for the best Mac-only games in existence.
Anyway, I coincidentally replayed Deja Vu for the NES last night; that brought back some fun memories. I knew the three NES ICOM games were just ports, but I didn't know they were originally on the Macintosh (I assumed PC or Amiga).
Rob
but they were awesome none the less. 1. Oregon Trail 2. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego It was '91 or '92 but those were the games I remember from back then...
Macfoxes.
There were three games that we played a lot of at Carnegie Mellon in my time. Maelstrom (ie, Asteroids), Marathon, and Macfoxes. If only they would port Macfoxes over to OS X.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
If I remember right, this started out on the Mac. Great classic Cold War geopolitical simulator, although I always ended up getting the world buried in nuclear ash...
How odd to see this up. 3 days ago my work told me I could have all the old macs. This got me:
4 30/SE
1 SE
1 7600/132
1 quadra 700 [not sure].
I downloaded some games etc. had some fun. I'm going to set them up for the kids to play with [I have 6 kids]. Some interesting notes:
the se/30's have 40 MB hard drives. they still work. 8 MB of ram on these bad boys...16 Mhz. Amazing-and the games are still mildly entertaining. shanghai, civ, etc.
they were free-and there is some decent games for them in shareware and abandonware.
Ah, the memories of playing Crystal Quest, Crystal Crazy, and Shufflepuck Cafe. And blowing stuff up with the Spectre series of games.
and laughed...at first i thought it was joking when it said "mac gaming" and "history" in the same line...it's only been recently since mac gaming has been getting near simultanious release with PC versions of stuff (within 6 months). prior to a couple years ago mac gaming lagged very badly behind and lacked alot of games....sure there were some good games, but comparitively...
Pathways, Marathon, Maelstrom and Escape Velocity. Oh childhood, where art thou?
Oh yeah, playing Halo on a Microsoft Xbox and Freelancer on Windows XP.
Really a pity how shallow the Mac's gaming shelf has become. I mean, Panther wipes the floor with XP for just about everything except games.
Yep, I was working in the software industry when the Mac came out, and the first thing my company did was make a game. They did this millipede ripoff in about 1 month, and if I remember right the major portion of the budget was spent on designing and printing the packaging. However it certainly used the mouse, and it would be difficult or impossible to duplicate Millipede so well on a mouse-less MSDOS machine.
You can try it on a Mac here: Mouse Stampede
Jason Linhart wrote the game, but I got the job of drawing most of the icons. I'm particularily proud of the swiss cheese, it's pretty hard to draw something legible in a 16x32 space in two colors!
Honestly, the only MAC game that comes to mind was Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego that I played in grade school. That is sad. Somewhere things went terribly wrong for Jobs and company.
http://www.tomandemily.com
Thanks to 1UP/Ogamo for its feature discussing the early importance of the Apple Macintosh as a videogaming platform.
Whatever its contribution in the past, Apple is a gaming platform no more. As a Mac user and a semi-avid gamer, I really miss one aspect of my old PC - the über availability of games.
Anyone seen this parody? It's right on the money.
"The PC is so... so confusing! You go the store and there are like.... racks and racks of games. But on the Mac, there are just six!"
--J
and nobody mentions the Mac Gamer video from Red vs. Blue? O.o
Shufflepuck Cafe
:)
My God, did I play alot of Shufflepuck Cafe. I worked in a Software Etc. where we had a Mac Plus on display and that game got me through many a long, customer-free shift.
I can still hear the big, scary, fat dude that was the last opponent laughing at me when he got the puck past me.
MAC GAMING? Am I the only one that simply can't relate these two words with each other?
Nope
I just finished watching this movie, and its amazing how well it relates to this article.
to become at least competitve in terms of games. With the newest G5 revision, all power macs come with 2 cpus and a halfway decent video(9600 XT) card for $50 more. Now granted, the pm market is a small share of the already small mac market, but it still could mean more profits if you can port it for cheap(ie you coded it well)....time will tell I guess.
Sorry, not classic enough. Gimme "Ancient Art of War" or give me death! First program I ever used on a Mac, and that in 1986.
Kids these days...
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Doom. Doom was orignally designed to run on an Apple II. Quake was also originally on a Mac. And Wolfenstein 3D.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Prince of Persia was also available on the Mac platform...
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Bolo.
called Rescue Raiders, one very cool thing that the Mac version had was network play!
How is it that no one has mentioned Cyan Software yet? They are the makers of Myst and that uber-classic, The Manhole.
I used to share a flat with an Apple employee, and was friends with another Apple employee. Whenever they had to travel for business, they all used to take PhoneNet boxes for their PowerBooks (PB170-180 era) so they could play networked Bolo in the waiting lounge at the airport.
Just think how far we've come. And the irony of having their wireless networking offering called "Airport" makes me wonder if this was a common phenomenon for Apple globally.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
best line - 'They're everywhere'
All the best games come out for mac first. I'm not so sure it's true anymore, but for a while it definately seemed so.
Shufflepuck Cafe
Dark Castle
Crystal Quest (it was a sad day when this stopped working when I upgraded to "MultiFinder")
BattleGirl (anyone tell me how to make this work on OS X and I'll be your friend forever)
Snood
Escape Velocity series
I never did own a Mac back then, but I always enjoyed using others' for games. I don't think anyone has mentioned the (shareware?) arcade shooter Solarian II. Haven't played it since 1999, but now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind a quick game or two right about now ...
Because ease of use comes with a price.
... who else in the PC world is stunned that the history of Mac gaming was longer than one page? Heh.
"Derp de derp."
It was the 'first' serious multiplayer first person shooter you could download and set up and play for a whole weekend on the office network.
...
Man that was a fun game. Too bad DOOM came along and stole all the thunder
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Amen! Bolo was a favorite game back in school and still a great strategy game played today. Bolo was designed and never quite finished by Stuart Cheshire of Rendezvous/ZeroConf fame. Released before the TCP stack matured on MacOS, and never updated since 1995. Still a great game, runs in black and white on classic macs or color, easily networked up to 16 players via PhoneNet (well, sometimes you get netsplits after 8 or 10). One thing I love about the Mac platform is this game was compiled for 680x0, runs in powerpc emulation, and in os x via classic, over the airport, across the world. It still works! I remember: - ladmo and indy bot - spiking pillboxes - designing maps - wasting entire lunch breaks and afternoons - 5 trees to build a boat - pillboxes have longer range than you, fire faster and take more damage. go out and capture them all. - collecting your teams pillboxes and breaking alliance. hehehe. - desperately waiting for your builder to parachute back in.
Mac gaming
Now you're just making stuff up.
All it did was remind me of how bad I was at throwing rocks at rats on screens 2 and 3.
(if somebody happens to have the URL available and can post it before I dig it up, I promise that you'll ruin my productivity for the weekend)
Frog blast the vent core!
Where do you think Bungie came from? They coded only for the Mac for years. I beieve that Marathon II was ported to Windows 95 at some point... but it wasn't until Myth: The Fallen Lords that Bungie looked for a presence on both platforms. And, even then, they coded on the Mac and then ported the games and tools to Windows.
Even Halo had its first public preview at a Macworld years ago. It wasn't until Bungie sold out (and the founders split, with Peter Tamte still developing and porting to the Mac) to MS that Bungie became close to non-existant in the Mac gaming world.
We could go on for hours about how important the Mac was in PC gaming, but if you read the article, we won't have to. I suggest picking up a used Mac from the early-mid 90s and finding some games... you'll be pleasantly surprised.
1987, 88. I can't rememember the name, but you were in a overhead view controlling a rotatable/thrustable ship (a la Asteroids) that you had to fly through a maze. Most of the maze walls meant death, but some you could bounce off of (as could your shots). There were guns that shot at you, and some of the mazes/screens had a "gravity" feature that would pull you towards some point source (always with "death walls" between you and it.) It was pre-color macs by a long ways; I played it quite a lot in 1988 or prior.
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
Any one remeber the original wolfenstein game (and I am not talking about ID's wolf3d).... It was 1981, top-down prespective and blocky graphics, what more do you want?
Then there's the nearly completely forgotten Citadel: Adventures in the Crystal Keep
Entirely drag and drop inventory system and visible character statuses on character icon, and pixel-by-pixel character movement in icon combat area (as opposed to block movement like Ultima). Monster combat was done in a different window than the dungeon view (which was like Wizardry) and had a targeting circle around your character to show range.
Drag 'n Drop inventory is everywhere in RPGs nowadays, but back then, everything was keyboard still (click T to trade and 5 for character 5 sort of thing).
For some damn reason, the first game that comes to mind when I think of Apple and games is still Crisis Mountain.
Fortunately my first gaming memories of Macintosh gaming rests solely with Ultima II, which is just a tad bit better.
I liked Dark Castle, but played it more on different systems (Still have it for C64 and Genesis) than the mac, and I still think I liked Uninvited and Shadowgate better than Deja Vu.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
There was that great port of Risk...awesome dorm game.
Some stuff came later, what was that one that had an early rendition of Dilbert? Like "MVOD", moving vehicles of destruction?
And Weslyan Tetris.
And Milles Bourne, loved that.
Never had a mac but loved 'em.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Enough said. That game was one of the best.
Cliff is in the process of making a sequel to it as well, due out on Halloween.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
(from the article:) From Dark Castle, then, descends the modern first-person shooter. Mouse-look is essentially a 3D rendition of what Dark Castle did in two dimensions (although Abuse refined the concept into something more readily recognizable as the precursor of first-person point-and-shoot). See what you want to hit? Point the mouse at it and do it. Point, and click.
Sorry guys, you totally missed it. 'Abuse' was not a first-person-shooter. It was a 2D side-scroller along the theme of the movie 'Aliens'. (The creatures even made the same sounds, and looked pretty much like the movie aliens.) It was point-and-shoot, though. You moved left/right (and jump) with the keyboard, and used the mouse to aim at enemies, and fired by clicking the mouse button.
There was also a version of 'Abuse' released for Windows, and yes even Linux.
I read the article (which was kind of brief) and I know Bungie made the huge Xbox hit Halo...but beyond that, I think you'd have to work a lot harder to make the case that "We could go on for hours about how important the Mac was in PC gaming". Admittedly I didn't play that many Mac games , Risk and some card games and some very pretty Ambrosia conversions of some classic games, and I supposed any game the heavily utilizes the mouse probably has some ancestor in the early Mac catalog, but in general I see Mac games in their own, generally derivative, little world.
(Don't get me wrong: I recongize Marathon was prolly better than the PC FPS of the time, and stuff like Spectre was way cool, but still...)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
You may not see the influence, but it's there. It's akin to keeping in mind that Miles Davis studied classical musicians at Julliard - you don't need to know Beethoven to appreciate Davis's work, but Davis's work wouldn't be the same without that influence.
You didn't have to play the games for my argument to be valid. The designers of the games you played on the PC had to play the Mac games.
Eh, I'm sure there was some of that, but that doesn't mean it's quite as important as you'd assume.
Sometimes it's clear that a game maker probably said "lets do DOOM, but 'better'". Like how Diabolo was an *admitted* work to get NetHack w/ then modern graphics (and some other changes).
But other instances, when the influence is subtle, it's hard to know what was a definite influence, what was probably co-influenced by a common ancestor, and what might be a seperate independent invention. Video games have a large and varied history, and you can't even say "well this game play mechanic happened on Mac first, therefore it was infleuence on this later game", since maybe the developers never saw that Mac game, and sort of re-invented the idea.
You can go crazy with this stuff is all I'm saying. Like, someone notices a similarity in a run by Miles Davis and something Beethoven: maybe it was deliberate, maybe it was something Miles picked up and without realizing brought back in, or maybe it was some bit of Beethoven Miles hadn't actually heard. It's tough to make a definitive claim with that stuff.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Blitz Max, a variant of Blitz Basic comes out on OS X in a couple of months' time, meaning a small but growing army of coders should be putting stuff out for the Mac soon (especially since they just have to recompile the code they've already written for Windows -- no port costs to worry about).
Gallery of stuff created with Blitz
"I coincidentally replayed Deja Vu for the NES last night; that brought back some fun memories."
So you're saying it was Deja Vu all over again? Seems stangely familiar...
The Quadra 700 was a 25MHz 68040. More info at www.lowendmac.com.
Don't bogart my .sig, Durandal!
More Bob quotes:
See ya starside!
Hey! Watch it!
They're everywhere!
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Looking forward to seeing just how the zealots deal with this. Lets see - we will either see attempts to deflect away from the fact that there almost are no games on the Mac (however it is getting better admittedly with Doom3 planned etc) or we will see the obligatory "games dont matter" arguments (fair enough if you only use your computer for work). No doubt we will see things along the lines of the usual "Apple invented x" where x in this case is games, or perhaps we will be told that there are more games on the Mac than any other platform (no seriously - it would not surprise me to see people write this - if they also believe it then we are getting into scary territory).
Here is something else I have learned about Mac culture - take a look at all the message boards like MacRumors etc. See - there is this cultural thing where they all post the spec of their machine, often with (I'm not kidding) the brand of their memory! From what I can see, those who have the best PowerMac or most iPods are revered.
Here I will attempt to throw the zealot mind into confusion - you see - I just ordered a DP2.5Ghz PowerMac, into which I will be throwing about 4Gb of RAM. This puts me (for now) at the top of the Mac food chain, meaning that my statement here cannot be modded down!