For modern audiences, “Mac” and “gaming” are not two words that seem to go together. However, across the history of Apple, the company has experienced highs and lows when it comes to the gaming industry.
Just when it seems that Apple is about to become a desktop gaming juggernaut, it makes a decision that kneecaps those ambitions, only for the whole pantomime to play out again. Today, it seems that Mac gaming is on its (hopefully final) upward trajectory, so it’s worth looking back at both the good times and the bad.
The Apple II Is a Gaming Monster
First released in 1977, the Apple II family of computers is hugely important to video game history. This was a fully-integrated desktop system with a color display capable of (for the time) high-resolution graphics. The Apple II was sold in one form or another for roughly 16 years, with several upgraded models over the years. Apple sold an estimated 5-6 million Apple IIs, and they were a common site in schools.
There are an enormous number of Apple II games, though getting an exact number is tricky. MobyGames documents just short of 3,000 titles but it depends on how you classify what counts as an Apple II game, since later titles need improved hardware from later interations to work.
While most of these games made their way over to DOS and the IBM PC, titles like Prince of Persia and Oregon Trail first saw the light of day on the Apple II, and a huge number of important titles like Castle Wolfenstein, Karateka, Wizardry and Choplifter are associated with the Apple II.
To put it mildly, if you enjoy great video games, having an Apple II in your home gave you one of the best gaming experiences of the day.
After the Apple II, the First Mac Was Black, White, and Boring
With such a great color home computer, you’d think Apple would top it in every way, but the very first Mac was a monochrome computer aimed more at professional customers and serious applications.
It did have sharp, high-res graphics, and there were a fair few games developed for this expensive computer, but it’s no surprise that plenty of people simply kept their Apple II systems to enjoy that huge library of color games.
It’s not that I want to blame the first Mac for not being what it wasn’t designed to be, but Apple definitely did its gaming credibility no favors with the Mac, and this gave other platforms ample time to pass it by.
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The Color Mac Brings a Slew of Amazing Games
A screenshot of the enhanced remastered version of The Journeyman Project.
From the Mac II onward, color returned to Apple’s desktop machines, and with it a number of amazing games. Some of which would later make it to the PC platform, but if you wanted to be on the cutting-edge of multimedia gaming, Mac was where it’s at.
Games like Myst, Bungie’s Marathon, SimCity, Civilization, The Journeyman Project, and so many more brought live action video, digital audio, and even basic 3D graphics to the desktops of Apple users. Even when games were multiplatform, the Mac II (or later) version would be the better one.
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The Pippin Destroys Apple’s Gaming Cred
The Apple-Bandai Pippin is Apple’s (to date) only attempt at entering the video game console market, trying to follow in the footsteps of Nintendo and Sony. Released in 1996, the Pippin was essentially a customized Mac designed mainly for games, but you could run other Mac software as well. Apple probably saw the Pippin as another way to get into people’s homes, but unfortunately the company shot more than a few holes in its own boat with the Pippin. Not least of which was the price: $599! That’s about $1,200 in today’s money.
Apple wasn’t the financial giant it is today, and most of the marketing costs were carried by Bandai. No one wanted to buy the console because it was two to three times the price of a Nintendo or Sony console. If no one buys a console, there’s no reason to develop games for it. In the end, only about 42,000 Pippins were sold and a lot of money went down the drain.
Intel CPUs and Bootcamp Killed Interest in Mac Game Development
Sometime after the glory days of PowerPC Macs, Apple realized that IBM’s chips were not going to meet their power and performance needs in the future. Particularly when it comes to mobile computers. So the company switched CPU producers and changed over to Intel. Now both Macs and PCs are running exactly the same hardware architecture, which leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities.
Thanks to Bootcamp, you could officially run Microsoft Windows on your Mac. So if you wanted to play Windows games, it just took a few seconds to reboot your Mac and choose Windows instead of macOS. There are no compatibility issues, and assuming your Mac had the hardware to power the game in question, you were good to go.
The only real issue with this, is that game developers had very little reason to develop native macOS games during this time. If Mac owners could simply boot into Windows and play any game they liked, why invest the time and money on a native Mac port? It was awesome of Apple to allow something like Bootcamp, but it’s a move that certainly put a damper on Mac gaming as a whole.
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In an effort to make Macs more attractive to developers, Apple developed Metal. This is an API (Application Programming Interface) that helps developers get the most out of Mac hardware. Apple designed Metal to offer a low-overheard, high-performance gaming experience and has packed advanced modern graphics technologies like ray tracing and AI upscaling into the package.
On the other hand, Metal is yet another API that developers need to learn, where Apple had the option to simply support Vulkan, which is a cross-platform API which is also aimed at providing high-performance, low-overhead gaming. More developers would surely make games for Mac if they had the option of using Vulkan. The good news is that there is a translation layer that lets Vulkan run on Metal called MoltenVK, but that does somewhat undermine the reason both Meta and Vulkan exist. I.e. having a low-overhead API.
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Apple Kicks OpenGL to the Curb and Dumps 32-bit Support
Apple also made the decision to deprecate OpenGL support on macOS. So, while OpenGL games should still work, future support is gone and developers don’t have a path for maintaining their existing games other than porting them to Metal or using MoltenVK.
Apple seems to have a habit of dropping “legacy” feature support (like headphone jacks on smartphones) and that’s not a good way to build trust with game developers. The other egregious example is Apple’s decision to drop 32-bit software support on macOS and the whole iOS family. Overnight, thousands of games simply stopped working, because they had no 64-bit version.
Some developers, like CD Projekt RED, had the time, resources, and inclination to port their games to 64-bit, but to this day the vast majority of 32-bit Mac games will not run on macOS Catalina or newer.
This sort of decision-making is exactly the sort of friction that game developers would prefer to avoid. After all, over on Windows, developers still sell and maintain their 32-bit games decades after their release. These games bring in enough money to justify the minimal upkeep they require, but if Microsoft decided to flat-out remove 32-bit game support on Windows, you’d see most of those games abandoned as well.
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Apple Silicon Supercharges Gaming on Mac
Apple eventually dumped Intel chips in its computers for much the same reason it switched to Intel in the first place. Intel’s technology was too hot and power-hungry to meet Apple’s requirements. If you look at how Intel has struggled to shrink its chips and only recently managed to become competitive with the Lunar Lake family of processors, I’d say Apple made the right choice.
My last Intel MacBook, a Core i5 MacBook Pro, got so hot during normal use that it would be very unsafe to use on my actual lap. So it was high time for Apple to move on, and it turns out their experience designing chips for iPhones and iPads had paid off in spades. The Apple Silicon M1 chip represented one of the biggest generation-on-generation upgrades in history.
Even the lowest-end M1 chip variant was capable of console-grade gaming, and Apple’s CPU and GPU performance has just continued to get better with each generation. RIght now, I’d rather play compatible games on my M4 Pro laptop than my big Windows gaming laptop, if for no other reason than the Windows machine sounds like a tornado.
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Right now Apple’s in a pretty good position to make Macs a strong, competitive gaming platform, but if history teaches us anything it’s that it likes repeating itself. So the cynic in me is waiting for the next chapter of the Apple gaming story where the company steps on the proverbial rake again.
