50 Vintage Mac Games & other Classics

[xAction]

Wow I never knew the classic Mac had so many games.
We should be able to create some of these, if they could run on 512K of RAM at 8MHZ we should be able to achieve decent results. I am amazed at that Frogger clone, it's got like 20 things moving on screen at once.

Featured in the video is GNOP! the first game by Alex Seropian, founder of Bungie.

And Prince of Persia, just look at it, first rotoscoped game, the mother of all Tomb Raiders.
And Spectre and Star Wars, so 3D wooo!

I thought I'd post this nice anthology as reference for what to try our hand at. At least to capture some of the mechanics as demonstrations. I had the Joust/Glypha/Flappy Bird physics down pretty good making the platformer demonstration, but of course that was a bug for that so I fixed it, but it's just a modification of jumping, and fun as all get out. Virtual yo-yo.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Wow I never knew the classic Mac had so many games.

In the late 1980s, compared to friends running MSDOS, Commodore, etc. there weren't that many games on mac.
I mean there was a few cool games, but Apple has never had a good gaming ecosystem for some strange reason.
They tried to enter the console gaming market at one point (Apple 'Pippin') that didn't go so well.
But I think as a way to compensate, using Emulation really started to take off on Mac fairly early on. I remember running Stella, iNES, and MAME on my PowerMac 6100 (1994?) and by the 1998-9 I was able to run something like 98% of Playstation 1 Games at full speed on the Mac using Connectix VGS (Virtual Game Station, which Sony of course promptly sued over), so my fairly casual gaming urges were fulfilled by that stuff, plus a few FPS (Like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and a few others).

There were a two B&W era late 80s Mac exclusive games that I found rather interesting in that they relied heavily on mouse input instead of keyboard or joystick. One was Crystal Quest and another was Pararena (which was more than a little 'Rollerball' inspired).

[xAction]

I mean there was a few cool games, but Apple has never had a good gaming ecosystem for some strange reason.

Steve Jobs didn't want the Mac to be seen as a gaming system, which at the time of the Mac's release was a hugely imploding industry due to market oversaturation with Atari, Intellivision and Coleco. Meanwhile just around the corner was the Amiga and down the block was abundance of Atari systems...both companies went to the grave. Steve Jobs was a notorious jerk to game developers, when he brought Bungie on stage with Halo it was like ...he'd been to hell and back, absolved his sins and been redeemed. Ah ah ah aaaah aaah

Did you know that after getting the exclusive rights to Halo for X-Box Microsoft made the largest PowerPC purchase from Apple in the company's history?

They tried to enter the console gaming market at one point (Apple 'Pippin') that didn't go so well.

Almost immediately after Amiga and Atari had collapsed trying to win market share from Sega, Sony and Nintendo (with the CD32 and Jaguar) and at the same time that Apple was imploding.

Connectix VGS (Virtual Game Station, which Sony of course promptly sued over).

I still have a CD for that around here somewhere. Just getting free discs from the cover of European gaming magazines made it all worth it.

[tperry2x]

Crystal Quest / Crystal Crazy - spent ages playing this as a kid on a Mac Classic
That, and Continuum.

Oh, just worth mentioning. There's a certain sound effect that the Crystal Quest / Crystal Crazy game uses when you complete a level. If you have your sound up, it may take some explaining - just so you know

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Connectix VGS (Virtual Game Station, which Sony of course promptly sued over).

I still have a CD for that around here somewhere. Just getting free discs from the cover of European gaming magazines made it all worth it.

Back when our PS1 optical drive laser died on us, my two oldest sons were heartbroken. They were 4 and 6 at the time but they were already 'gamers', and they loved the Disney Dance Dance Mix! But a techie friend of mine offered to repair it for free! When we got it back from him, he had not only fixed the laser eye, but he threw in a mod-chip to boot! I made back-ups of all of our game discs, which was fortunate because eventually they had scratched the original disc so much that they could not go past a certain 'level start' scene in the game and by then used copies of that particular title were already commanding 'collectors' prices. The mod chip also allowed it to play 'region-free' PAL and NTSC-JAP imports, and Homebrew and Emulators too! There was an NES emulator that was ported to PS1, which was a pretty nice thing to have.
There was also 'mod-chip' patch for VGS too: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/connec ... me-station.

[overclockedmind]

The original SimCity ran on black and white Macs. I might be an oddball, but that kept me occupied many, many an hour.

[richmond62]

In the days of MacOS 8 - 8.5 - 9 I was living in Al Ain, UAE, and my 2 boys were delighted to find that a shop that sold Pokemon CDs and so on was run by an Iranian Bahai chap who had previously studied FORTRAN with me when I stayed in that city before I got married, so was happy to run me off "P" copies of gameboy stuff which we ran on an Emulator on MacOS 8.5.

Personally I have never really been interested in computer games (beyond how they are implemented), being more interested in table-top abstract games.

[overclockedmind]

In the days of MacOS 8 - 8.5 - 9 I was living in Al Ain, UAE, and my 2 boys were delighted to find that a shop that sold Pokemon CDs and so on was run by an Iranian Bahai chap who had previously studied FORTRAN with me when I stayed in that city before I got married, so was happy to run me off "P" copies of gameboy stuff which we ran on an Emulator on MacOS 8.5.

Personally I have never really been interested in computer games (beyond how they are implemented), being more interested in table-top abstract games.

Hehe, "P" copies. And yeah, the implementation is just as interesting as the games in my opinion! May I ask what made the table-top games "abstract?"

[richmond62]

what made the table-top games "abstract?"

Wrong tense: they are still abstract. Here's one of the children I torture in my language school expressing his misery about his homework:
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monsterCH.jpg (204.97 KiB) Viewed 195 times

[richmond62]

In 1978, having got almost totally fried by Glinski's Hexagonal chess layout I worked out what I felt was a better one: and a while back someone posted it on Wikipedia:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... _Setup.png

Glinski was a brilliant soul insofar as he worked out a 'workable' hex chess layout, but he left fat too little space between opposing pawns.
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Glinski.jpg (26.49 KiB) Viewed 194 times

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An abstract game of mine is currently in production in Spain.

[richmond62]

Here's Glinski's layout:
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GlinskiCH.png (56.87 KiB) Viewed 192 times

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You will see that there is minimal space between the lead pawns.

Here's my layout:
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Mathewson_TriChess_Setup.png (55.99 KiB) Viewed 192 times

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Even though this diagram is for a 3-sided game you should be able to see that the space between the lead pawns is far better, and more closely resembles the space between pawns in "standard" European chess.

Aha: here we are:
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Mathewson_Chess_Setup.png (47.72 KiB) Viewed 192 times

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Certainly my diagrams were made with xTalk.

[overclockedmind]

I'm glad I asked! I'd not even heard of such things until your explanation. Thank you!