The Secret History of Mac Gaming

by Richard Moss

The Macintosh changed video games. It challenged the medium to be more than child’s play and quick reflexes. It made human-computer interaction friendly, inviting, and intuitive. Mac gaming led to much that is now taken for granted by PC gamers and spawned some of the biggest franchises in video game history — including Myst, Halo, and SimCity. It allowed anyone to create games and playful software with ease, and gave indie developers a home for their products.

It welcomed strange ideas and encouraged experimentation. It fostered passionate and creative communities who inspired and challenged developers to do better and to follow the Mac ‘think different’.

Written by award-winning journalist and game historian Richard Moss, The Secret History of Mac Gaming draws on a combination of archive material and around 80 interviews with key figures from the era to tell the story of those communities and the game developers who survived and thrived in an ecosystem that was serially ignored by the outside world. It’s a book about people who followed their hearts first and market trends second, showing how clever, quirky, and downright wonderful video games could be.

The Secret History of Mac Gaming also features guest chapters from Craig Fryar, Apple’s first Mac games evangelist and the co-creator of hit game Spectre, as well as specially-created divider illustrations and cover art by graphic designer and pixel artist JJ Signal, all styled in the gorgeous 1-bit aesthetics of early Macintosh games. At 480 pages long, The Secret History of Mac Gaming features eye-catching coloured page edges, a hardback cover printed with pantone inks and a colour-coded bookmark ribbon. As with all our books, we use thread sewn binding for extra durability and print lithographically on high-quality paper to showcase the gorgeous visuals as they deserve.

This newly-expanded edition adds around 70 pages of extra content, including a foreword by The 7th Guest co-creator and id Software and Apple alum Graeme Devine, plus an annotated timeline, over 60 extra images, an icon gallery, and more than 6,000 extra words added to the chapter narratives — on top of the 115,000 words from the 1st edition — covering a variety of additional game and developer stories, including the tales behind Snood, Chaos Overlords, The Dungeon of Doom, and more. It also revises and updates the design, based on reader feedback, to provide a better reading experience.

Book specifications
480 pages. 158mm × 230mm. Edge-to-edge high quality lithographic print. Hardback. Sewn binding for enduring quality and the ability to lay flat for ideal double-page image viewing. Coloured page edges. Bookmark ribbon. Shrink-wrapped. Free PDF for viewing on the go.

Includes contributions
Robyn and Rand Miller, Patrick Buckland, John Calhoun (Glider), Andrew Welch, Ben Spees, Matt Burch, Ian and Colin Lynch Smith, Steven Tze, Mark Stephen Pierce, Jonathan Gay, Bill Appleton, Steve Capps, Charlie Jackson, Peter Cohen, Trey Smith, Dave Marsh, Joe Williams, Brian Greenstone, Craig Erickson, Rick Holzgrafe, Chris De Salvo, Ray Dunakin, Cliff Johnson, Glenda Adams, Rebecca Heineman, Eric Klein, Marc Vose, Yoot Saito, Alex Seropian (Bungie).

Games featured
3 In Three / 3D Hearts Deluxe / 3D Klondike / 3D Tic Tac Toe / A Mess O’ Trouble / A-10 Attack / Airborne! / Airburst / Alice aka Through the Looking Glass / Amazing! / Another Fine Mess / Another World / Apache Strike / Apeiron / Aquazone / Arcomage / Ares / Armor Alley / Artillery / Asteroids / At The Carnival / Avara / Baker’s Dozen / Balance of Power / The Real Estate Simulation / Barrack / battle-girl / Battlezone / Beyond Dark Castle / Big Bang Board Games / Big Bang Chess / Billy Frontier / Bloodsuckers / Bolo / Bomber / Boogaloopers / Bosconian / Brickles / Bubble Trouble / Bugdom / Bugdom 2 / Burning Monkey Solitaire / Burning Monkey Solitaire 2: Monty Zuma’s Revenge / Bus’d Out / Cairo ShootOut! / Cap’n Magneto / Centaurian / Chaos Overlords / ChipWits / Chiral / Choplifter / Clan Lord / Classic Cribbage / Classic Gin Rummy / Color Dark Castle / Continuum / Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel / Creepy Castle / Cricket / Cro-Mag Rally / CrossCards / Crystal Caliburn / Crystal Crazy / Crystal Quest / Crystal Raider / Cythera / Daleks / Dark Castle / Deep Angst / Déjà Vu Lost in Las Vegas / Déjà A Nightmare Comes True / Derrat Sorcerum / Descent / Despair / Diamonds 3D / Dogfight City / Drakmyth Castle / Duke Nukem 3D / Enchanted Scepters / Enigma / Enigmo / Eric’s Cascade / Eric’s Solitaire Sampler / Eric’s Ultimate Solitaire / Escape Velocity / Escape Override / EV Nova / Escape From The Pit / F/A-18 Hornet / F/A-18 Hornet 2.0 / F/A-18 Hornet 3.0 / F/A-18 Korea / The F-16 Simulator / Ferazel’s Wand / Firefall Arcade / Flight Unlimited / Fokker Triplane Simulator / Forty Thieves / Frankie’s Dungeon / GATO / Glider / Glider 4.0 / Gl...

Genres: History, Video Games, Nonfiction, Technology, Game Design, Art

480 pages, Hardcover

Published October 29, 2021

Reviews

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I could give this book a higher rating. It's clearly a labor of love, filled with the details of early Mac game design. Lots of interviews with those early game creators. It hits some of my favorites, like Escape Velocity, Burning Monkey Solitaire, and most importantly - Gray Tower. The part about Louise Hope was so great! But the format of this book is so weird. Really bad formatting and while there's lots of art and screenshots, the pages just feel weird. 4.5/5 for content, 2.5/5 for design and formatting.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about the history of Mac video games, you say? It didn’t take me long to sign up for the Unbound release of the book over a year ago. I have had a Mac in one form or another at home since 1984. I’m a little biased when it comes to Macs. This book brought back a lot of memories of the times playing games on this fun machine.

The author was a former games evangelist at Apple, so he knew a lot of the people involved in this small industry. To us Mac fans, many of the people here are rock stars, but hardly known in the larger gaming world. As is commented by many of the Mac game writers in the book, no one really took them seriously. It was as if solving hard problems on a Mac didn’t count as programming or software engineering. But here we learn just how crazy the early Mac game pioneers were, along with how far ahead their thinking was in gaming.

For me, the biggest revelation from the book was that most of the early games were done by 1-2 people in their bedrooms. They were the ones that immediately saw the Mac for the revolution it was and wanted to make games for it. Most just started to play around, adapting game ideas they had. Then many of these efforts blossomed into getting paid to write the games the Mac community eagerly wanted.

Dark Castle, THE game for early Macs, was all done in assembly and coded by a teenager. Bungie, whom I met at MacWorld and where bought Marathon when it came out, were based out of a dingy building in Chicago. I thought they were a top flight group. I didn’t know they were overwhelmed by the fame and sales of that standard setting game.

There isn’t much of a narrative between the chapters. Some of it is dry, while other parts are just exciting to read. I think that has to do with how many of the games I had played and impact they had on me. Some companies like Bungie have their own chapter, while other chapters are based on a game genre. As someone who played a large percentage of these games during my formative years (and probably burning a lot of time that I could have been outside), it is a lot of fun to read the stories of how the games came together.

[Matt Sephton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was quite disappointed and underwhelmed by this book, much as I wanted to love it. Though I'm a Former Apple Technology Evangelist about half the book was new to me.

My expectations were to read a celebration of unknown game history, but instead the book is a collection of quite dry articles - presented as chapters - detailing various games, developers and eras. And it only discusses Western developers, with no acknowledgement that some of the best Macintosh games were created by non-English developers. I guess this is to be expected given that the genesis of the book was a set of articles. I just expected more of an overarching single narrative rather than separate sections. Several pieces of information are repeated across chapters, which is tiring and unnecessary. The books ends up reading like a (well written) Wikipedia article, rather than investigative journalism or detailed computer history.

Colour screenshots don't really work on e-ink displays, and the images in the digital version were generally far larger in dimensions and file size than they should be for an e-book, so were slow to load and often displayed cropped across pages. Most images are also inserted in the text far from their respective games.

Finally, I found the authors preference to describe the player as she/her quite distracting. It would have been much easier if they had referred to them in the third-person gender neutral way, as I have just done.

[Paul Weinstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable read. Each chapter is a standalone telling about some aspect of the Macintosh gaming world pre-Mac OS X. An easy read to pickup and put down at leisure.

As someone who's been a regular Mac user since those "classic" days, some stories I already knew by heart - such as that of the Miller brother's (aka Cyan) breakout game Myst. Others, like the ill-fated game console Pippin I knew in outline, but not the inside details. Oh, what a world it would have been if Apple had taken Bandai seriously!

But the real gem of this book is the telling of individuals who learned and invented a craft for a new class of computers, going all-in on creating breakout standalone and HyperCard-based games. Stories of one-hit wonders and shareware publishers who's journey would not be told without this book.

Fair warning, you may find yourself pickup up an old software catalog or booting up an emulator to rediscover the history of Mac games first-hand.

[Emanuel Blume · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book I’ve been waiting for since I was 8 years old. Richard Moss had done an amazing and huge work - documenting in a playful way what so many Mac gamers in the 80s and 90s thought they where the only ones to experience. Apparently, we weren’t.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taustoja peleistä mitkä raamittivat mun lapsuutta. Nostalgista. Kiinnostavaa kuinka nyt löytyy netistä tietoa pelien tekijöistä ja taustoista, kun taas 80/90-luvulla näki ainoastaan pelit.

[Greg Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful cover, lots of stories and interviews, a comprehensive look at gaming on the Mac in the pre-Intel era. I think this is an invaluable reference. But I didn't really like reading it. A few things bugged me:
* The organization is chapters dedicated to mainly genre, game, or publisher. Because each chapter spans the same ~20 year period repeatedly, I had no good sense of any timeline continuity. Devs would leave one chapter and show up in another as they moved companies. Sometimes things referred to in one chapter would have a note "see the next chapter for more about this". Expanded edition adds a timeline section, but doesn't change the organization of the book itself.
* I didn't get a good view of the changes to Mac hardware during the time. The B&W -> color, 68000 -> PowerPC -> Intel, and OS9 -> OSX shifts should have been (or were!) seismic upheavals for every developer, but the author waited until the very last chapter to mention their impact. It was hard to know which system a game was made for, what features it could or couldn't use, and the surrounding landscape of the industry.
* A lot of the dev stories just weren't compelling. No shade to the author here but I read so many indie startup stories that led off like "I was mowing laws and drinking beer all day while skipping college classes, when I discovered a Mac, and after seeing the holy computer mouse for the first time I dumped my life savings into a machine. Within months I had made the first (Tetris, Centipede, Arkanoid, etc) for the Mac and the shareware checks just rolled in." It's important to tell these stories but it's tedious to read.
* No mention of MECC / The Learning Company or any educational market, though school computer labs were often the only way a lot of young people were ever exposed to these expensive machines
* Would have liked more images (expanded edition probably corrects this).

Again, I'm glad this book exists, it's a wonderful historical reference and retrospective, but it just isn't compelling as a cover-to-cover read.

[Michael Goodine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really wonderful book that shines a light on an important period of computer gaming history that is quickly slipping from memory. A lot of people put a lot of work into Macintosh games in the 80s and 90s and it is great to have their stories told and recorded.

The book is mainly a collection of histories of companies and people. It provides an overview of the rise and fall of companies like Ambrosia, Freeverse and Pangea... but also those tells the stories of interesting individuals like John Calhoun (Glider) and Cliff Johnson (The Fool's Errand). These stories are told using research conducted by the author and a great number of detailed interviews with the people involved. The number of people Moss was able to talk to while putting together this book is quite impressive.

The design of the book is gorgeous, and it really highlights the sort of pop-art that Mac games from the time gave us.

A good index is included, in case you are looking for something specific.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are complaints about the formatting, and sure enough it's not a reference book, it's not a overarching presentation of hidden gems and lost history - although I can see how one could assume that from the title.

Instead it's a journalistic take on various genres, that from the very beginning the Macintosh defined. The earliest of network games, the first LAN party, high-resolution modern art, voice acting, digital-only distribution, are all pioneering aspects NOT of the Macintosh - but of Macintosh developers.

Those developers are assigned their respective chapters based on their contributions, NOT to the Macintosh, but to all of gaming. In those chapters the author embraces his journalism background to not only uncover the Macintosh roots of modern gaming, but the people and stories that got us to where we are.

I bought it, I could not put it down. I have a hardcopy, I have a PDF and I'm going to buy the ePub when it is published

[Timothy Vreeland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Moss has done an excellent job here, seamlessly blending reviews and research into a reader friendly experience. If you were a mac user in the 80s or 90s, if you were a gamer in the 80s or 90s, or if you simply want to pick up some history on an era or platform you may have missed... you cannot pass up this excellent read. It is a wonderfully mastered book with almost 500 pages crammed full of delicious word food. Full page pictures break up the read here and there to help the reader step deeper into the world of the past. The book is a thick yellow unit, that is somewhat similar to the original Macintosh system itself. Don't skip this one.

[Jon Thysell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the backstories of all of these classic games. They inspire me in the work that I do.

But I'm reading the PDF, because the book is physically awkward. Small and extremely thick, it's both burdensome to hold up and lay flat. Also the paper is very thick but has a weird newsprint feel to it. This book would have been much better as say a large but thinner, traditional "coffee table" book with glossy pages, with more emphasis on the screenshots.

A great, fun book, but the PDF is the purchase, the book is the "bonus".

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through lots of interviews, Moss explores Mac games, why there were so few games made for classic Mac OS, and how the various pre-OS X platforms ended up extending the era of bedroom game coders.
Oh, and thanks for dusting off the ol' neuropaths that encode "Jared Butcher of Song", which will now be stuck in my head.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of interesting things to learn but the lack of a narrative pulling it together and some weird typographical/interior layout choice makes it kind of hard to sit down and read.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nostalgic, well researched and awesome.

If you like Indie games read this book.

[Beau Teague · Rating 5 out of 5]

If this is for you, then this is a 5 star book. If you don't know if it's for you or not, I have no idea what the rating would be!

[RavenWorks · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great look behind the scenes of all the fondly-remembered games that were opening Mac-owners' eyes to the possibilities of the platform.

I was expecting something more like a broad but shallow catalog of the era—the kind of approach that many retro gaming related books seem to take—but in fact it's a series of deep dives into different major topics, such as specific developers, or specific major genres. It's full of great anecdotes, revealing what it was like to stumble into fame as the computing industry was turning several major corners in terms of accessibility and reach. Putting names and stories to these games that had always somehow seemed monolithic and mysterious as a player is so satisfying; the paths to their creations turn out to be so twisting and personal.

[Xavier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such an awesome book! And how crazy is it that I probably have played over 80% of the games that are mentioned, especially those from the shareware era of the late 80's/begin 90's. So cool to relive these great times and finally read the background stories. By the way, keep your iPad close, as you want to look up these games on YouTube while reading. And of course, Shufflepuck Cafe FTW!

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent journey down memory lane. Although I wasn't a hard core Mac gamer, my first Mac was a MacPlus, so many of the chapters brought back good memories and the others were a glimpse into the history of games on the early Macs.