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.

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.