I think one of the reasons is that MacOS didn’t really have any games back then, so there was no reason for a kid to be glued to their computer. And if you use something for a long time, you collect problems and ways to solve them, getting the experience and some technical knowledge along the way.
Number munchers and Oregon trail have entered the chat. Also the dozen other games on floppy disks (that my middle age mind cannot remember now) that we played on our Apple IIe’s.
There were so many more, and better games, for PCs.
The only good games on Mac were ones ported from PC.
I was my mother’s official “troubleshooter”. If a customer returned a game, she gave it to me, to test.
There were definitely a lot more PC games returned than Mac, but there was almost never anything wrong with them. Probably came down to individual setups.
Which was Mac’s strong point. There was no real diversity in hardware, so everything worked.
But all the Mac games SUCKED compared to PC.
Unfortunately, this was also when I was exposed to Ultima IV… and my homework never saw me again.
I’m not so sure but I think back THEN there were less captivating PC games as well. My perspective is from the early 00s Russia, when you had to deal with pirated games, unbelievably slow Internet, funny videos shared between friends on CDs, going with a hard drive to a friend’s house just to share your music collection, etc. Basically, we had to know how to do this kind of stuff because the alternative was so expensive. Now with LLMs you don’t even have to “google” anymore, so there’s no need to know, for example, what a file extension is.
Interesting perspective. I was in the rural US and my experience was probably closer to yours than you might think. 33-48kbps modems were insanely slow, even back then. Between that and my parents banning the Internet in the house, most everything I got my hands on was pirated, and either painstakingly (secretly) downloaded over midnight hours on the unreliable modem or from a floppy disk or burned CD from a friend! This was circa 1997-2001 until I moved out and got a usable Internet connection.
Yeah, that checks out, I usually notice a 10-20 years “cultural” gap. Personal anecdote: watching The Sopranos in 2020s still felt like the topics in russian media and culture are just starting to catch up, before that no one really talked about depression as a disorder, and people taking ADs were seen as “crazy”.
The time period we are discussing is 25-45 years ago. Macs haven’t been a thing kids have “grown up on” in decades, so I’m guessing you’re quite young. Mac games blew Windows games out of the water for years.
Mac had heaps of games in the 80s and 90s. Then from the 90s to the 2010s, it was WINDOWS TIME for games, with some being ported to OSX and Linux or run with compatibility software. Now it’s Windows/Linux hardcore and still only small or modest Mac support.
Mac did have a ton of fun games back then, though! I didn’t get a Mac of my own until Intel Core Macs came out, but I loved the Macs I used at my friends’ houses and school.
I went through an edgy “Apple is worst computers” phase in the 2000s, but I grew to like the hardware and OS after I picked one up to install Windows on to bring to LAN parties (all non-Mac laptops that could play games fuckin suuuuuucked back then and I was never at home.)
I don’t know about better, but the Mac games I had in elementary school were awesome for kids that age. Oregon trail and number munchers. I don’t think pc gaming had really taken off much at all then. That was years before doom, even.
In the 90s, especially early 90s, the hardware was just plain faster and more capable. Coupled with a remarkably robust shareware community, gaming was great on them. The difference between Doom II (the PC-DOS game everyone remembers) and Marathon, which was its mac contemporary, was ridiculous. Textures, resolution, gameplay complexity, the ability to actually look up and down, etc.
Then Gil Amelio tried to turn them into a business-focused company for a few years, and mac gaming never fully bounced back from that. I mean, it almost did. Halo was going to be a Mac exclusive at launch, and then Microsoft bought out Bungie right before launch to sell their new X-Box.
I don’t know whether that example is so convincing.
Marathon does look more advanced than Doom II, but Doom II was not much more than an extra campaign for Doom (with bigger levels).
Doom was one full year Earlier than Marathon. While it may not seem a lot right now, back then that was a long time. One year after Marathon, Duke Nukem 3D came out, and that looked already like big leap.
And 6 month later we got Quake, that is suddenly in full 3D instead of having sprites for the characters.
No, that’s fair. Marathon came out about 1 year after the first Doom. But it ran at full 24 bit color, higher resolution, had gameplay mechanics such as secondary triggers, magazine-based weapons, maps that were proper 3D (Doom I and II couldn’t really loop parts of the map under/over each other, as it was essentially still a 2D map with 3D visuals). Basically during the 90s, a game was already obsolete once it was maybe a couple years old. More than anything, Marathon has a proper story and story writers, but that’s more about the gaming environment at the time than the hardware. Bungie pre-microsoft was kind of amazing. Them and Ambrosia Software were top of their niches.
Duke Nukem was another leap, although they still hadn’t quite figured out the whole “look up or down without severe distortion” that so many 3D shooters in the mid 90s suffered from.
But yeah, prior the the Pentium becoming the mainstream processor that most people would have in their machines, those Motorola 68k’s were powerhouses.
That’s the time period we’re discussing lol. The OP literally talks about kids growing up on Macs. No kids have grown up on Macs in school for decades. It’s either iPhones or iPads since then.
So yeah I’m talking about 30 years ago, no shit. And no I’m not having trouble processing anything, it just seems like most people in this thread didn’t tie the time period together properly (probably correlates pretty well with the question honestly!).
I think one of the reasons is that MacOS didn’t really have any games back then, so there was no reason for a kid to be glued to their computer. And if you use something for a long time, you collect problems and ways to solve them, getting the experience and some technical knowledge along the way.
Number munchers and Oregon trail have entered the chat. Also the dozen other games on floppy disks (that my middle age mind cannot remember now) that we played on our Apple IIe’s.
My mom worked at Software Etc in the 80’s.
There were so many more, and better games, for PCs.
The only good games on Mac were ones ported from PC.
I was my mother’s official “troubleshooter”. If a customer returned a game, she gave it to me, to test.
There were definitely a lot more PC games returned than Mac, but there was almost never anything wrong with them. Probably came down to individual setups.
Which was Mac’s strong point. There was no real diversity in hardware, so everything worked.
But all the Mac games SUCKED compared to PC.
Unfortunately, this was also when I was exposed to Ultima IV… and my homework never saw me again.
Were you under the impression I don’t believe there were pc games back then? I didn’t say that, also, funny enough you say
But the only games I specifically named actually were on Mac first then later ported to DOS.
Someone clearly never played Dark Castle
I’m not so sure but I think back THEN there were less captivating PC games as well. My perspective is from the early 00s Russia, when you had to deal with pirated games, unbelievably slow Internet, funny videos shared between friends on CDs, going with a hard drive to a friend’s house just to share your music collection, etc. Basically, we had to know how to do this kind of stuff because the alternative was so expensive. Now with LLMs you don’t even have to “google” anymore, so there’s no need to know, for example, what a file extension is.
Interesting perspective. I was in the rural US and my experience was probably closer to yours than you might think. 33-48kbps modems were insanely slow, even back then. Between that and my parents banning the Internet in the house, most everything I got my hands on was pirated, and either painstakingly (secretly) downloaded over midnight hours on the unreliable modem or from a floppy disk or burned CD from a friend! This was circa 1997-2001 until I moved out and got a usable Internet connection.
Yeah, that checks out, I usually notice a 10-20 years “cultural” gap. Personal anecdote: watching The Sopranos in 2020s still felt like the topics in russian media and culture are just starting to catch up, before that no one really talked about depression as a disorder, and people taking ADs were seen as “crazy”.
Yep. A lot of people also say that the rural US is typically about 20 years behind california in a few ways, which I also agree with.
There were so many games, just not AAA titles
Huh? Mac had the better games! In fact I lived in the countryside and our school was mostly Macs until I got to high school.
That’s a wild claim.
The time period we are discussing is 25-45 years ago. Macs haven’t been a thing kids have “grown up on” in decades, so I’m guessing you’re quite young. Mac games blew Windows games out of the water for years.
Mac had heaps of games in the 80s and 90s. Then from the 90s to the 2010s, it was WINDOWS TIME for games, with some being ported to OSX and Linux or run with compatibility software. Now it’s Windows/Linux hardcore and still only small or modest Mac support.
Mac did have a ton of fun games back then, though! I didn’t get a Mac of my own until Intel Core Macs came out, but I loved the Macs I used at my friends’ houses and school.
I went through an edgy “Apple is worst computers” phase in the 2000s, but I grew to like the hardware and OS after I picked one up to install Windows on to bring to LAN parties (all non-Mac laptops that could play games fuckin suuuuuucked back then and I was never at home.)
I don’t know about better, but the Mac games I had in elementary school were awesome for kids that age. Oregon trail and number munchers. I don’t think pc gaming had really taken off much at all then. That was years before doom, even.
In the 90s, especially early 90s, the hardware was just plain faster and more capable. Coupled with a remarkably robust shareware community, gaming was great on them. The difference between Doom II (the PC-DOS game everyone remembers) and Marathon, which was its mac contemporary, was ridiculous. Textures, resolution, gameplay complexity, the ability to actually look up and down, etc.
Then Gil Amelio tried to turn them into a business-focused company for a few years, and mac gaming never fully bounced back from that. I mean, it almost did. Halo was going to be a Mac exclusive at launch, and then Microsoft bought out Bungie right before launch to sell their new X-Box.
I don’t know whether that example is so convincing.
Marathon does look more advanced than Doom II, but Doom II was not much more than an extra campaign for Doom (with bigger levels).
Doom was one full year Earlier than Marathon. While it may not seem a lot right now, back then that was a long time. One year after Marathon, Duke Nukem 3D came out, and that looked already like big leap.
And 6 month later we got Quake, that is suddenly in full 3D instead of having sprites for the characters.
No, that’s fair. Marathon came out about 1 year after the first Doom. But it ran at full 24 bit color, higher resolution, had gameplay mechanics such as secondary triggers, magazine-based weapons, maps that were proper 3D (Doom I and II couldn’t really loop parts of the map under/over each other, as it was essentially still a 2D map with 3D visuals). Basically during the 90s, a game was already obsolete once it was maybe a couple years old. More than anything, Marathon has a proper story and story writers, but that’s more about the gaming environment at the time than the hardware. Bungie pre-microsoft was kind of amazing. Them and Ambrosia Software were top of their niches.
Duke Nukem was another leap, although they still hadn’t quite figured out the whole “look up or down without severe distortion” that so many 3D shooters in the mid 90s suffered from.
But yeah, prior the the Pentium becoming the mainstream processor that most people would have in their machines, those Motorola 68k’s were powerhouses.
They are talking about stuff from 30 years ago and having difficulty processing that they are old now.
That’s the time period we’re discussing lol. The OP literally talks about kids growing up on Macs. No kids have grown up on Macs in school for decades. It’s either iPhones or iPads since then.
So yeah I’m talking about 30 years ago, no shit. And no I’m not having trouble processing anything, it just seems like most people in this thread didn’t tie the time period together properly (probably correlates pretty well with the question honestly!).
You’re either very young, or didn’t have access to Mac’s as a kid. The games were great. Number Munchers was sick.
I don’t think 40 (how long ago Number Munchers came out) can be considered “very young.”
Yes, that’s my point. He’d have to be in his 20’s to have missed all the early Mac games.
If he’s 40 he for sure would have either played them, or just never been around Mac’s as a kid.
More like 30s, minimum. If you were born 30 years ago in 1996, by the time you’re able to use a computer it’s already 2000 and Mac is left behind.
Did it have Zoo Tycoon? No? I think we’re done here.
It did have zoo tycoon… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_Tycoon
But this is still after the period I’m talking about.