Mac Gaming - Early Game Development On The Mac

Early Game Development On The Mac

Prior to the release of the first Macintosh computer, a number of marketing executives at Apple were concerned that including a game in the finished operating system would aggravate the impression that the graphical user interface made the Mac toy-like. More critically, the limited amount of RAM in the original Macintosh meant that fitting a game into the operating system would be very difficult. Eventually, Andy Hertzfeld created a desk accessory called Puzzle that occupied only 600 bytes of memory. This was deemed small enough to be safely included in the operating system, and it shipped with the Mac when released in 1984. Puzzle would remain a part of the Mac OS for the next ten years, until being replaced in 1994 with Jigsaw, a jigsaw puzzle game included as part of Mac OS 7.5.

During the development of the Mac, a chess game similar to Archon based on Alice in Wonderland was shown to the development team. The game was written by Steve Capps for the Apple Lisa computer, but could be easily ported to the Macintosh. The completed game was shown at the Mac's launch and released a few months later under the title Through the Looking Glass, but Apple failed to put much marketing effort into ensuring its success and the game was not a top seller.

Subsequent game development on the Macintosh included titles such as Dark Castle (1986), Microsoft Flight Simulator (1986) and SimCity (1989), though mostly games for the Mac were developed alongside those for other platforms. Notable exceptions were Myst (1993), developed on the Mac (in part using HyperCard) and only afterwards ported to Windows, Pathways into Darkness, which spawned the Halo franchise, The Journeyman Project, Lunicus, Spaceship Warlock, and Jump Raven. As Apple was the first manufacturer to ship CD-ROM drives as standard equipment (on the Macintosh IIvx and later Centris models), many of the early CD-ROM based games were initially developed for the Mac, especially in an era of often confusing Multimedia PC standards.