Apple Mac - Blog Posts

died in 2022/ reborn in 2024

— welcome back, Ventura

I’m still working on some art stuff, so I figured I’d try something different. Here is my Mac games collection I built up earlier this June and August, part of a final push before I stopped retro game collecting entirely (it’s expensive yo, and it was getting toxic to where I sold off or donated a good chunk of it but I digress).

Around that time I had transitioned over to the Apple ecosystem entirely because I had seriously bad luck with crappy laptops and a badly built gaming PC - I’m the sort of person that would want to just plug something in and not worry about if a component is broken or whatever. Not to mention, it felt more interesting for me looking at Mac versions of popular PC games (well, that and Win/Mac titles).

What astounded me these few months collecting these games were the following:

Holy cow, these games were rare. Mac games are not easy to find, I think that’s obvious to retro game, computer or Mac collectors. A lot of them were like $30-100 on eBay. Luckily I didn’t pay that much for these games, BUT Ghost Recon, No One Lives Forever and the Rainbow Six games are easily the rarest out of my collection. Republic: the Revolution was the only one I found at a thrift store. Win/Mac titles like the Blizzard franchises and dinky edutainment titles are easier to come by.

A lot of boomer shooters were given Mac ports. Again, the aforementioned Ghost Recon, No One Lives Forever and the Rainbow Six games, but Aliens vs Predator, SoF II, RTCW, the CoDs…I was not expecting to find Mac versions of Black Hawk Down, Prey and Allied Assault.

Guess what? You still needed to dink around with specific Mac models (namely the Power Macs in this case, most of these games are OSX) to get these games working. You still needed good video cards and CPUs and all that stuff. Of course Intel chipset only games are there, that’s a bit different but I’m not that much of an expert on Intel Macs.

Where could I get these games back in the day? From what I saw, CompUSA and Best Buy and GameStop, and Apple Stores. Yeah, you could buy physical boxed Mac games at Apple Stores…boy, did I miss out on that!

Porting: native Mac versions of these games were ported irregularly, sometimes in a handful of months, or taking a year or more to be ported. I like to think it wasn’t due to porting difficulties and more to the install base, Apple being…Apple and publishers being like “yeah nah can’t justify this, better give it to these third party companies”. Ghost Recon’s Mac port came around the same time as its console ports. Meanwhile, the Mac version of Need for Speed Carbon, which I don’t have, came out two years after the game released (2006…Mac in 2008!!).

Makes you think that *gasp* Macs are viable PC gaming outlets! Well, just recently - took Apple long enough to pull their head out of their ass to realize that with Apple Arcade and their Silicon Macs supporting games like Cyberpunk 2077, the ResiEvil remakes and RoboCop of all things. Still, figured I’d look at an oft forgotten piece of gaming history.

Maybe I should share the rest of my collections next, idk