PC and console gamers alike consider the idea of “Mac gaming” to be a bit of a joke, but the truth is that for much of Apple’s history, its computers (even before the Mac) were the place to play the latest and greatest games. Which is why it’s a good time to remind everyone of that fact.
The First Mac Games
The Mac was obviously not Apple’s first home computer, and the Apple II was a hugely popular game development platform. Wikipedia lists 632 games for the Apple II, and that’s probably not a comprehensive list. The Apple II was home to legendary games like Wizardry, Ultima, King’s Quest, Choplifter, Karateka, Prince of Persia, and oh my goodness, I need to write a separate article for the Apple II, don’t I?
The first Mac, released in 1984, didn’t come across as a fun home gaming machine, especially since (unlike the Apple II) the Mac had a monochrome screen, and it initially shipped with just 128K of RAM, with a later 512K upgrade being possible. So it seems shipping with too little RAM is an age-old Apple tradition!
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That did not stop developers from making games that would run on the first Mac, such as Lode Runner, Mac Attack (another Battlezone Clone), and lots of other interesting titles that, despite being monochrome, are incredibly crisp with detailed graphics and animation.
The Mac was aimed more at people who wanted to do “serious” work at home, but video games will always find a way, and even the Mac got its share.
The Macintosh II Brought Color to Mac Games
While it wasn’t hugely more powerful than the first Mac, the Macintosh II brought color to the Mac line, something that was sorely missed by many Apple fans, who simply stuck to their color Apple II systems for gaming. This wasn’t a system that brought a bunch of new games, but a number of classic Mac games received an upgrade to support color.
However, this was a computer with a starting price of about $5,500 (over $15K today!) which put it in workstation territory. That really puts complaints about “expensive” modern gaming PCs in perspective! At this price it’s not like the install base was massive, which makes it hard for game developers to justify the time and expensive of making games for Mac, or porting them from other platforms.
However, the Mac II was a lot different to the original Mac, which wasn’t particularly upgradeable. The Mac II line had a more IBM PC-style design with plenty of expansion options, and later models down the line could run more intricate color games.
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Still, games like Pathways Into Darkness, and an early first-person shooter by Bungie of Halo fame, listed the Macintosh II’s Motorola 68020 as the minimum requirements in the game manual. So it was quite a capable machine!
Myst and Marathon Put Apple at the Cutting Edge of Gaming
During the 90s, Mac gaming reached a technological peak, especially thanks to the advent of multimedia on CD-ROM. Games like The 7th Guest and Myst showed off what could be done with full-motion video. Marathon and its two sequels gave us a Mac-exclusive answer to DOOM.
Macs were just a little ahead of PCs and even consoles on the multimedia front, until the advent of the original PlayStation and PCs sporting CD-ROM drives, sound cards, and Windows 95. After which, the shiny edge wore off the Mac logo.
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The Apple Console Fails Spectacularly
While there were undoubtedly some amazing games for Mac, they were a happy accident on a computer system designed for work, not play. However, in cooperation with Bandai, Apple produced a gaming console named the Pippin in the mid-90s that went head-to-head with the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. The killer feature of the Pippin is that it could play Mac games, but it was too expensive, too slow, and Apple sold barely any of them. It’s one of the company’s biggest and perhaps most embarrassing failures.
Apple Loses Halo
By the late ‘90s, Apple seemed poised for a gaming resurgence. At Macworld 1999, Bungie showcased an ambitious new project—Halo. However, Microsoft swooped in and acquired Bungie in 2000, turning Halo into the flagship title for its upcoming Xbox console. This was a major blow to Mac gaming, as one of its most promising titles became a Windows and Xbox exclusive.
You can see the original demo below.
Of course, at this point Halo wasn’t a first-person shooter yet, and was being developed as a real-time strategy game, effectively what we got with the later Halo Wars games. So there’s no telling whether the Halo we would have got on Mac would still be the groundbreaking game we know and love today.
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The Apple Gaming Lull – Intel CPUs, Bootcamp, and Windows Games
Following the switch from IBM PowerPC chips to Intel processors, with the first Intel Macs hitting the market in 2006, things were pretty quiet when it came to Mac gaming. I think one potential reason for this was that Intel Macs could run Windows using Apple’s Bootcamp solution. This meant that you could play pretty much any Windows PC game on your Mac, assuming it had the specs to run it.
While having to dual-boot was annoying, it did mean there wasn’t much incentive to create native Mac games, since Mac owners had a rock-solid solution to games on their Apple systems. That doesn’t mean there were no native Mac games, just that it wasn’t all that common.
Another reason Mac gaming during this period wasn’t exactly hot is thanks to the terrible, underpowered Intel integrated graphics chips of the time. Even my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro could barely run the Mac native version of Bioshock and Mac desktop owners had a limited selection of AMD cards to choose from, if they had any options at all.
A major turning point came in 2010, when Valve brought Steam, the largest PC storefront, to macOS. This made it easy to find, buy, and play Mac-native games from one convenient place. Even better, Steam is independent of the Mac App Store, and even today it’s usually much cheaper to buy a title on Steam than on Apple’s official storefront.
In 2014, Apple released Metal, its 3D graphics API similar to DirectX and Vulcan. Metal is a proprietary replacement for OpenGL, and aims to give low-level console-like access to the GPU, allowing for the best performance and better power efficiency in 3D applications like games.
With Metal, Apple laid the foundation for game developers to more easily create modern games for macOS, and it’s also the foundation for Apple’s in-house ray-tracing and AI-upscaling technologies, which are later additions.
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Apple Silicon Changes Everything
In 2020, Apple announced and released its M1 chip, the first of the new “Apple Silicon” Macs, leaving Intel behind. This changed everything, since not only is Apple SIlicon much more power-efficient than Intel’s chips, but it offered substantial GPU improvements. My base model M1 MacBook Air could essentially play the same types of games as my PlayStation 4, and suddenly even the cheapest Mac was a capable gaming system.
Fast-forward to today, and modern Apple Silicon systems are competing with mid-range gaming PCs when it comes to graphical power, and Apple has aggressively expanded its gaming support. Many developers have ported or intend to port their Windows or console games to Mac, and Apple has provided a game porting kit to make this as easy as possible.
However, thanks to an overall advancement in compatibility layer technology, which is what makes the Steam Deck capable of playing Windows games, Macs may not even need many native ports to be great gaming machines again. For example, I’ve had a great time playing games using Whiskey, which runs almost every Windows game I’ve tried so far.
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It’s also important to note that Apple Silicon Macs can run the exact same software as iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs. This means that game developers essentially have to port or develop a game just once, and can then distribute it to that massive user base of combined Apple customers.
Right now, the future of Mac gaming looks far brighter than any point in the company’s history, and with renewed interest in Apple’s ecosystem from game developers and players alike, I expect there will be many exciting developments over the next few years.
