What was gaming on Macintosh like back in the day?

I've learned a lot about PC gaming back in the 90s but I've always seen Mac be cast to the side. Marathon being one of my favorite games ever did get me interested in other games made exclusively for Macs but it got me thinking about how Mac users, or Apple as well, were able to keep up with the rapid advancement of computer hardware especially in a time when was Quake coming out. It never seemed like the Mac was built to run games beyond the most basic ones.

It was pretty limited, though there were lots of small-scale shareware and freeware games.

I spent a lot of time with the Mac Wolf3D and Doom communities that existed at the time, with things like Batman Doom and Laz Rojas's work.

It was going to the computer lab at elementary school and going up to the big beige box and playing Number Muncher and KidPix until the hour was up. (You thought I was gonna say Oregon Trail, didn’t you?) I have no experience with it beyond that, we always had DOS/Win machines at home growing up. I know that doesn’t really dispel your impressions much.

56 minutes ago, Stupid Bunny said:

(You thought I was gonna say Oregon Trail, didn’t you?)

I came here to say that it was an Oregon Trail machine. I hated using Macs at school. I've always found post-Windows era Apple products to be unappealing in almost every way, with some exceptions (I genuinely enjoyed the iPods I had back then, especially my iPod Touch 3 and my old iPhone - the touchscreen alone felt like the future). But using a Mac always felt to me like having training wheels on. And they were ugly, in my opinion, in terms of hardware and OS. I HATED the fucking bastardized mice that were so unsatisfying to click. I remember my friends talking about how cool the computers were, because their families had never owned a computer of any kind, and I would always be like "nah man, you should see what we have at my house". So, even as a child I was unimpressed. Modern Apple products can blow me.

1 hour ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Modern Apple products can blow me

I have to deal with them semi-regularly at my business. It's very rare I'm not completely pissed off with them within 30 minutes. But ultimately it's what some people are used to.

4 hours ago, oneselfSelf said:

It never seemed like the Mac was built to run games beyond the most basic ones.

I can't entirely agree with this. Because modern gaming PCs are exceptionally powerful, they are also quite expensive at the high end. This makes us forget that back in the day, gaming computers tended to be inexpensive models. The early IBM PCs were expensive business machines, and the top gaming computers of that era were things like the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, Atari 400 and 800, and the Commodore 64. In 1987, they would all be eclipsed by the Amiga 500, which hit the market at $699 with a set of custom chips that gave it sound and graphic capabilities well beyond those of Macs and PCs of similar and even greater price. The Amiga custom chips gave it hardware sprites that guaranteed a 50fps frame-rate in the side-scrolling shooters and platformers that dominated the scene in those days—all this with a Motorola 68000 running at 7.14Mhz. 

The Amiga 500 was central to the early success of Electronic Arts, which Trip Hawkins and other former Apple employees founded in 1982. So as we can see, Apple was in various ways important to the gaming industry in the early days. As for Macs themselves, it's not so much that they weren't built to play games, but that their high cost meant relatively few were sold, and with few sold, the market wasn't there to draw game developers.

By the late '80s, it was clear that the top game machines of the time -- the Amiga 500 and Atari ST -- would soon be surpassed by a new generation of PCs of similar price and much greater sales volume, so game developers abandoned the Amiga and Atari in favor of PCs, and by 1990 or so the PC was the leading game computer. A big advantage of PCs was the ability to customize their configuration, so you could get a good spec for less money, especially if you could build one yourself.

Doom was obviously a demanding game when it first appeared, but my PowerMac Performa 5200 handled it well enough. It was inexpensive for a Mac, and with a PowerPC 603/75Mhz, it outperformed 486 PCs. Even better was my Power Computing PowerWave 604/132, which was a PowerMac 9500 clone costing over $3,700, much too expensive for a gaming machine in the classic sense.

IMO, the era of modern gaming PCs began with the first 3DFX Voodoo cards. By the time they appeared, I had already bought a PC with a Pentium 166 in order to play Quake, and I soon added a Voodoo card. Once Voodoo cards became available for the Mac and Amiga, I bought them for those platforms, too. By this time, PCs were outselling Macs by a vast margin, and Commodore, the company that manufactured Amigas, was out of business. Once Nvidia took over as the primary developer of 3D accelerators, the Mac fell even farther behind in the world of modern gaming, because for the longest time, Nvidia wasn't available on Apple products, though the ATI Rage and Radeon series was. Ultimately, it wasn't so much the spec as the price and the limited population of Macs in the wild that doomed the machine as a game platform. 

The Secret History of Mac Gaming is an excellent tome on this exact subject. I have the original, pre-expanded version. It's excellent, full of information and also probably thick enough to concuss someone with. Perhaps a pinch pricy in physical form, but there's a text-only digital version that's a very reasonable ten bucks. It has The Kinsie Endorsement, for what little that's worth. Throw it on your favorite tablet or ebook reader, pair with a dash of Mini VMac and SheepShaver and you've got a fascinating little hike through an alternate history on your hands.

14 hours ago, oneselfSelf said:

I've learned a lot about PC gaming back in the 90s but I've always seen Mac be cast to the side. Marathon being one of my favorite games ever did get me interested in other games made exclusively for Macs but it got me thinking about how Mac users, or Apple as well, were able to keep up with the rapid advancement of computer hardware especially in a time when was Quake coming out. It never seemed like the Mac was built to run games beyond the most basic ones.

I can't say much about the 80s Macs (There is that Kinsie book to tell you all about that) but in the early to mid 90's Apple went from 68k to PowerPC, often supplying games as a Fat binary supporting both. This was also tied to the Classic MacOS. Titles include Descent, Starcraft, Quake etc.. (and Marathon ofcourse!)

The thing is, until the Mac G3 which included a hardware accelerated GPU (And Quickdraw 3D RAVE) most Mac's simply had 2D framebuffers. Everything was software rendered. The sleek pizzabox macs usually were 68K and the only PowerPC one (PowerMac 6100) had a terrible upgrade path.

The Mac Mini G4 recieved quite a few games, from Battlefield 1942 to Halo for OSX.

I still remember staying well after school ended playing Marathon Infinity with my computer teacher and two other students over a LAN.  There were also some obscure what-would-be-called-indie games back then such as Barrack and Stardust which were plenty of fun.

We had a computer class at school (in the late 1990s) that had a limited selection of pretty old Macs, although I don't remember the model. The bigger class had second-hand 386s, which later got replaced by Pentiums w/ Windows ME (for some reason). Anyway, I spent a very limited time with the Macs, as we were mostly in the big class. I remember they had coloured graphics and this classic MacOS windowed interface, and there were two games: Civilization (which I think was the only time I played that game) and SimLife. I spent most of my time with the latter, designing Zerg lifeforms, as I was mad about StarCraft back then.

Anyways, many years later I discovered Spiderweb Software's Exile RPGs, which were originally created for Macs in the shareware scene, and liked them a lot (I played the Windows version on an XP machine, but later I tried out the Mac versions too using Executor. I was never much of an RPG fan, but these Exile games have a certain charm about them, so I spent quite some time and enjoyed them a lot. The setting is very neat.

I've never played any Marathon games on an actual Mac, but I tried the first game's demo under Executor, and it kind of worked.