Why I’m writing a book about the history of Mac gaming
First things first: I’m writing a book called The Secret History of Mac Gaming. It draws on around 80 interviews and all the archived material I can get my hands on to craft a narrative around the Mac gaming scene — and especially the Mac game developers — of the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s.
UPDATE: The book is published. You can find out more about it at secrethistoryofmacgaming.com and read excerpts on Gamasutra, Ars Technica, and GamesBeat. I’m also now working on a second volume, which I’ll be self-publishing — I’ll have more news on that sometime in 2020.
It may seem a strange topic for a book. Of all the devices that videogames have appeared on over the past 60 years, why would I choose to focus on Macintosh computers and not something that’s actually known for its gaming prowess like the Amiga or even the Mac’s predecessor, the Apple II?
In short, because the Mac’s significance to videogame history has been sorely understated. And because there’s a great story here that nobody’s told before.
I’d like to think that’ll be enough to convince you to support me, and if it is then please go ahead and pledge now. /*The campaign is currently scheduled to end on July 26, but we could do with more pledges ASAP to get the momentum rolling again.*/ UPDATE: The book is published. You can find it here. Keep an eye out for news on a second volume in 2020.
For those of you who need more convincing, here’s the long(er) version.
The Macintosh changed videogames. It seldom gets credit for this, but it did. It — and its tight-knit community — challenged games to be more than child’s play and quick reflexes. It standardised and explored the mouse as input device. It showed how to make human-computer interaction friendly and inviting. Oft ignored but nevertheless important as a challenger to the status quo, the Mac was found at the periphery of computing and gaming — where it quietly thrived. The Mac made charm, whimsy, and ease of use selling points. It became almost like a cult symbol, and it sparked feverish loyalty beyond even the “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” marketing of the 1990s console wars (in which Sega railed against Nintendo’s kid-friendly policies and increasing dominance of the home console games market). That cult of Macintosh had a character all its own — one that was steeped in philosophical leanings as much as aesthetic preferences and anti-establishment ideas.
This was most evident in Apple’s Think Different ad campaign (here’s the TV ad) of the late 1990s, which spoke of (and to) the square pegs in round holes, the innovators and creative thinkers like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi who changed history forever. It was emblematic of Macintosh culture in a manner far more profound than outsiders realised. The Macintosh community was different, more tight knit, more daring, more creative, and more conflicted as to its place in the world. The subset of the culture that focused on games perhaps even more so.
I know because I was there. I grew up with the Macintosh. I saw the inside track and the ostracism within computing and gaming circles that came with preferring a computer that was different to the norm. Different to Windows. PC users didn’t understand us. Why spend more money on a computer that had less software and a mouse with only one button, they’d ask, looking for a fight. But they didn’t see what we knew to be true. They didn’t get why we preferred a Mac in part because they never gave it a chance. But mostly because we never showed them. They might spoil it.
Those of us who owned a Macintosh were snobs. It was our way or the highway, and as early as 1984 our way constituted WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) interfaces, high-resolution graphics, high-quality sound samples, multiple fonts, and an expectation that software creators believed in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. Companies that did this succeeded — in the gaming sphere, Broderbund, Interplay, Maxis, and later also Blizzard were embraced for putting effort into the Macintosh conversions of their PC games. Those that didn’t walked away, falsely concluding that there was no market for the kind of software or games that they were producing.
With limited support from established companies in the software and games scene, the Macintosh community grew its own. Those home-grown developers accomplished amazing feats. They produced the world’s first multimedia authoring tool, World Builder, which allowed its users to build their own graphical adventure games without typing a single line of code. They bent Apple’s similarly-straightforward, transformative multimedia and hypertext authoring tool HyperCard to their will to turn the humble children’s book into a magical go-anywhere adventure through an (interactive) lightly-animated storybook world. They made some games that looked like interactive — albeit black and white — cartoons and others that could be networked across multiple machines at a time when the thought of online gaming was a pipe dream. They crafted innovative first-person exploration games and showed that first-person shooters could have deep stories.
“I was picturing this more as a book where there would be a page and there would be things to play with on a page and interact with on a page and then you would turn the page and go to the next part of the story. But he drew the first page, which was a picture of a fire hydrant in the background and a manhole cover in the foreground, and then he instead of — the interactivity of that was to click on the manhole and it would slide open and a vine grew out of it into the sky. Then immediately you are enticed to explore…”
-Rand Miller on The Manhole, an early HyperCard game and predecessor to Myst
Many of them went on to incredible things. One created the multimedia toolset that became Macromedia Flash, which dominated the web in the latter part of the 1990s and throughout the 2000s (as Adobe Flash from 2005 onwards). World Builder’s creator later programmed bestselling PC and Mac game Titanic, which topped software sales charts for months. Cyan Worlds took their adventure game Myst to even more extraordinary heights, with several million sales and the title of best-selling PC game of all time until The Sims took its place in 2002. And an independent outfit called Bungie — creators of several of the Mac’s best and most popular strategy and action games — got bought for big money by Microsoft soon before they released Xbox system seller Halo in the early 2000s.
Other Mac game developers achieved more limited levels of commercial success but nevertheless had a hand in some amazing stories of community, creativity, and determination. One of my favourite stories is of a simple little game created in 1988 by a college student called John Calhoun. He took inspiration from his childhood fascination with paper aeroplanes and the dilapidated look of his college living quarters to develop a game about a paper plane trapped in a house. Glider, as it was called, was to many the quintessential Mac game. It painted a world of magical mundanity in which everything ordinary — tables, air vents, bookshelves, light switches, and more — transformed into something extraordinary purely as a matter of perspective. The player piloted her plane with arrow keys, avoiding furniture that could end their flight and relying on updraft from ducted heating vents and lighted candles to keep them airborne as they struggled to escape a run-down old house in favour of the freedom and limitless possibility of the great outdoors.
By the mid-90s Glider had its own full-featured “house editor” that players used to transport their humble paper plane to fantastical worlds — the Titanic, fictional space stations, undersea chambers — as well as new sources of magical mundanity such as museums and supermarkets. A dedicated community of thousands of fans shared their creations, which also included incredible houses that would effectively “play” themselves like a Rube Goldberg machine, and in addition to websites and message boards they crafted zines that were filled with house reviews, tips and tricks, and interviews with prominent house builders.
“There was a mall my friends and I would ride our bikes to that had a large air conditioning unit outside. The air conditioner had a large powerful fan that was mounted on top of the unit and blew straight up. Standing on a ledge over the unit one day, I began launching things over it and watching them get lift from the column of air blowing out. At first I found small cup-shaped foam packing peanuts to drop on the column of air. Then I started folding paper helicopters and airplanes and tossing them out over the unit to watch them float and rise on the column of air.
At other times, I would find places with an updraft (balconies on tall buildings for example) and could amuse myself for hours with bubbles, paper helicopters or paper airplanes.”
-John Calhoun on his initial inspiration for Glider
Community was the glue that kept Mac gaming together and the grease that prevented it from stagnating in the days before OS X. The platform was too small to attract much interest from professional media outlets. Both mainstream media and the bulk of the enthusiast games press ignored Mac gamers — acting as though they didn’t exist. So the Mac gamers themselves stepped up. There were dozens of fan and community-run news websites and e-zines — Mac Gamer’s Ledge and Inside Mac Games perhaps the most prominent among them — that served up details about new and upcoming titles and investigated misdeeds or strange happenings. These people were citizen journalists and bloggers before the terms held any meaning; they were ordinary, untrained workers from all sorts of different occupations who wanted the companies serving their hobby held accountable, though more often than not their output was more along the lines of free marketing for the developers doing it right.
“So for pretty much half of 1983 they were going to ship Alice with every computer, and then the press started saying ‘oh this is just a toy’ and Steve cornered me in the men’s room and said ‘I hate to tell you this, but we’re not gonna ship it with every product.’ I said it’s okay, fine by me. But he said ‘oh, we’ll make it up to you.’”
-Steve Capps, original Macintosh team member and creator of the first published Mac games — Alice aka Through the Looking Glass and Amazing
The Mac gaming scene was also curiously ahead of the curve. Apple alternated between half-hearted or enthusiastic support and a kind of tolerant hostility in its approach to games, which were considered damaging to efforts to court business users in the Mac’s early days because they lent credence to the notion that the friendly and easy to use Macintosh was a mere “toy.” Yet Mac gamers had reliable, aggregated tools for playing multiplayer games over the Internet years before their PC brethren. They also expected digital distribution as a standard as far back as the 1990s, when shareware companies such as Ambrosia Software and Freeverse ruled the roost.
The top shareware developers on the Mac were like rock stars to the Mac faithful. Though many of their products never made it out to the big sea of Windows computing, their productivity utilities and games enriched the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of people — most of whom bought in to the human beings who wrote them regular newsletters and poured their hearts and souls into the products they created.
“I was quite astonished how little my track record counted for in the UK games industry. People had never heard of my products — let alone me. The UK was so anti-Apple and anti-Mac, I was basically starting from scratch. Unless you had a background on the Spectrum, BBC, Commodore-64 or at least the Amiga, you were treated as a noob. The fact that my first commercial game was published in 1982 — and by the giant and very serious Thorn EMI Video Programmes Ltd, not some bedroom startup — meant nothing. Neither did the fact that Crystal Quest had stayed in the top five in the Mac games charts for literally years, only being beaten by Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.”
-Patrick Buckland on setting up Stainless Games in 1994 ahead of creating Carmageddon
The Macintosh was always the underdog, first to “Big Blue” IBM’s push from mainframes to personal computers and then to the horde of IBM-compatible PCs that ran Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The Mac survived because its millions of users could not let it die.
Mac gaming survived because enough of those millions wanted to be entertained at their computer. The market realities made it hard — games are expensive to develop, to the point where commercial titles needed to be pushing a million-plus sales by the end of the 1990s, yet even the big hits struggled to break six-figures in Mac sales. But through sheer will and determination, it worked. A cottage “porting” industry ensured that a trickle of popular games from other platforms made their way to the Mac. Small companies such as Aspyr, Westlake Interactive, and Logicware all made their money by converting the code, sound, and art of Windows titles to work on Macintosh computers and then publishing these conversions in what limited retail space remained for Mac games.
A thriving shareware scene pre-empted the indie revolution that swept the games industry in the latter part of the 2000s, and arguably plugged the gap between that resurgence and the initial “bedroom coder” indie movement on Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in the early 1980s. Mac gamers may have suffered in getting triple-A franchises like Tomb Raider and Unreal Tournament and Sid Meier’s Civilization years later than everyone else, but they were spoilt for choice when it came to smaller or more experimental titles.
In the early years they had World Builder and a smattering of other influential adventure games — some that brought interactive whimsy to children’s entertainment and others that dealt with more mature themes. They also had definitive original versions of top-drawer arcade-style games such as Shufflepuck Café and Spectre and of the popular MacVenture series, along with best-in-class simulation games such as Sub Battle Simulator and GATO (and later the likes of F/A-18 Hornet), plus several other innovative Mac exclusives — including The Colony and Glider. Then later they had the likes of Marathon, Escape Velocity, Exile, Spin Doctor, Burning Monkey Solitaire, Harry the Handsome Executive, and dozens of other brilliant games that may have lacked a little of the flash of bigger-budget fare elsewhere in the gaming sphere but were every bit as good as — or sometimes better than — the non-Mac alternatives.
Well into the 2000s, and to an extent still as I write this in 2016, the broader games scene had a running joke that the Mac didn’t have games. The truth, however, was that most people who weren’t part of the club didn’t know where to look. Mac gaming’s vibrancy and creativity was the Mac’s best kept secret. This book is about letting that secret out.
Learn more at secrethistoryofmacgaming.com
