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The Evolution of Mac Gaming
Next Generation has a piece up exploring where gaming is going on Max OS X. From the article: "Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren. Sometimes that lack of support was due to hardware and input devices that weren't competitive with the PC, but the adoption of PC standards like AGP for graphics cards and USB support for 'proper' multi-button mice did away with those obstacles. But the largest reason usually has had to do with the size of the Mac market."
My friends always wanted to *emulate* macs for the purposes of gaming -- just the one game Escape Velocity. Heck, I *still* emulate a Mac just so I can play it from time to time (I know they have Nova for the PC, but I like the old ones better).
Sure, Mac gaming pickings have always been a bit thin, but it felt like a tighter-knit community, and they still always had the quality, just not necessarily the quantity.
Much like Slashdotters and their PSPs, the main games I play on my iBook are emulated! It makes a great portable Gameboy Advance, SNES, NES, or Sega Genesis. We all bought those old games at some point, and now you can use your new hardware as the ultimate gaming machine.
But the largest reason usually has had to do with the size of the Mac market.
What about the fact that most of the computers Apple ships come with a GeForce 5200 (iMac), Radeon 9200 (Mac Mini), or have crappy ATi laptop cards (iBook/PB) and are NOT UPGRADABLE? Not to mention the low RAM that comes standard.
Sure, they ship the G5s with good cards.. sometimes.. but I dropped $3 grand to get my DP 2.5 with a 6800 Ultra in it.
So blame the market all you want, I'm sure that's a good portion of it. However, if those MacIntels use stanard PC gaming cards, I'm willing to wager an upswing in Mac gaming.
Latewire
Umm, no. Mac gaming was alive and well throughout the 80's and in to the 90's. It wasn't until the utter PC/Wintel domination around the time that Win3.1(1993) came out that Mac gaming started to become noticably weaker. This is by no means a market that has always been weak.
The issue isn't that the good games aren't available. They eventually make it over, and they must be making money (or they wouldn't keep porting them.) The major issue that I see is that Mac users don't get the good games until at least a year after the PC release (like Neverwinter Nights, to name just one.)
I can understand not wanting to gamble on the Macintosh version before it is known if a new game will be a hit, but give me a break! Games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic were hits looooong before they were ported to the Mac.
In my opinion, the best we Mac users can hope for with mainstream games in the near future is shorter porting time with the switch to Intel processors looming.
Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren.
wtf are they talking about?!?! I remember way back when... before win95. Before the pentiums. Mac gaming was where it was at. When I had my 486, I used to envy the macs and commodors and amigas.
Prince of persia is a prime example of the lack of sound and graphics support the PC world had at the time. The only decent games of taht time period were doom and wolfenstein3d.
Macs had digital sound built in. no need for that soundblaster add-in card for real sound and music over the bleeps and clicks of the PC speaker. Macs also, generally, had more VRAM, too, so they generally had much more complex graphics.
hmph.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
It doesn't really matter that Gateway had USB ports around 96/97 (USB 1.0 is from january 1996), the USB boom didn't start until 1998, which is coincidentally the same year that Apple released the iMac. Also: Platform wars are dumb. Use the best tool for the job.
The USB standard was released in 1995. There was support in PC land, but it didn't really embrace USB until after the iMac. If you were a peripheral manufacturer and wanted some of Apple's tiny market share, you had to go USB. Even at the iMac introduction, the variety of USB peripherals sucked unless you wanted a keyboard or a mouse. Apple took the plunge and got everyone else who was standing on the edge just sticking their toes in the water to jump in after them. Why do new PC desktops and 3rd party motherboards _still_ come with 2 PS/2 ports, a parallel port, and a standard serial port, along with a collection of USB ports?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Those two words, to me represent the biggest tragedy for the Mac gaming world. Games like Myth and Marathon and their sequels were like Doom and Warcraft for people with brains. These guys always had stuff that was way ahead of other game makers and they always developed for the Mac first. Halo was even announced when they were still a Mac-developing company (based in Chicago, I think) if I remember correctly. When I heard the news that Bungie had been bought by none other than MS, moved HQ to Redmond and was going to release Halo as the flagship Xbox game I... well, I really can't even talk about my reaction, I still get a little too choked up. The last brilliant gasp as a Mac-developing company was Oni, which was very late and lacked the mult-player features that it was supposed to have, but it was still an excellent game. Does anybody know what happened exactly? That is, did MS just have so much money that the Bungie guys couldn't say "no" or were they in financial trouble already? As I mentioned above, they seemed to be getting way behind schedule in their development, so it seems plausible that they were having money problems.
I'm just sayin'.
A big problem: although there were great 80's Mac games, Apple did not support game developers and publishers because Macs are for "serious" and "professional" purposes such as office and school use, film, art, graphics, music. Macs are for professionals who make content for the entertainment industry, NOT for frivolous entertainment such as games. Then cheap dual processor wintel boxes became weapons of choice for 3D game artists. Microsoft brass and staff saw opportunity in games and fostered the industry. Apple brass didn't want their cute designer Macs to be perceived as toys, hence they refused to support games.
Avid and hardcore gamers in the market for a computer will buy Wintel, not Apple because you can't play most games on a Mac. I won't consider buying a Mac until all games are supported.