Text adventures and Apple Lisa ports came almost immediately, with Lode Runner - ported from the Apple II in 1984 - hot on their heels. The Macintosh's monochrome display and limited RAM restricted its potential as a games machine, and Apple instead marketed it as a productivity machine - they were very careful to avoid having the Macintosh labeled a 'toy.' The closest thing to a game available for the first Macintosh was a desk accessory called Puzzle.īut it wouldn't be a computer if it didn't have games, and entertainment software soon emerged on the system. In January 1984 Apple released the revolutionary Macintosh 128k computer, which featured an operating system that used a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of the command-line interface found in other personal computers at the time. In future articles, I'll look closely at the current situation and try to predict the future of gaming on the Mac. In this first article, I'll look at the history of Mac gaming. Over the course of three articles, I will discuss the highs and lows of Mac gaming.
But the Mac hasn't always been a wasteland for games, sparsely populated by a handful of the PC's sloppy seconds. And given the repeated snubbing from big publishers and developers in recent years, you can easily understand why. The Mac isn't exactly known for its ability to play games.
