8 ms·

Fun fact: Bungie was planning on releasing Halo (one of the genre-defining FPS games) for Mac, and even demoed it first on a Mac at MacWorld Expo in 1999... the

Fun fact: Bungie was planning on releasing Halo (one of the genre-defining FPS games) for Mac, and even demoed it first on a Mac at MacWorld Expo in 1999... then Microsoft bought them out[1]. I remember a while back (in the G3/G4 era), there were a lot of fun and creative games that were either Mac-only or Mac/Windows... once consoles started taking over more serious gaming, and once DirectX started taking a stranglehold on game dev in the early 2000s, it seems the 'blockbuster' or 'hardcore' Mac gaming market really dried up. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie#Halo_and_buyout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie#Halo_and_buyout

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
joshmn 10y ago
This was such a joy to read. Also, slightly more factual: http://kotaku.com/5796019/when-halo-was-on-the-mac-and-was-a-totally-different-game http://kotaku.com/5796019/when-halo-was-on-the-mac-and-was-a... I actually devoted way too much time playing (what was dubbed) "Halo PC" and spent a lot of time in the community. If any of you played at a semi-frequent level, I'd love to connect. We probably have some mutual friends. I know there's one of us (" ") who played at a very competitive high-level who now runs an thriving eCommerce startup!
crisnoble 10y ago
I remember playing Marathon[1] on a Mac, still one of my favorite games, lightyears ahead of any other game I had played at that time. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game)
- sevensor 10y ago
  My freshman dorm had a computer lab. One third of the computers were macs, and two thirds were PCs. The macs were for Marathon, and the PCs were for people doing homework. Except for the month when all of the computers were for watching "The Spirit of Christmas" over and over. While I'm dating myself, let me add that we could print for free on the dot matrix printer, but the laser charged against our print quotas.
  - watersb 10y ago
    For you young folk: "The Spirit of Christmas" was an animated short that led to "South Park". Was commissioned by an advertising executive as a holiday gift to industry pals, distributed on video tape. Friend of mine transcoded it to QuickTime MOV format -- a technical challenge at the time -- and once digital, it spread like wildfire. QuickTime was a Mac-only video format at the time.
    - sevensor 10y ago
      That friend of yours -- he's a hero to my entire generation.
  - memco 10y ago
    Our lab had free printing from the macs because they didn't have software available to track and charge people. Using a PC came with a printing tax. Good reason to use Macs back then.
munificent 10y ago
This was not fact was not fun if, like me, you were a Mac fanatic and gamer back in the 90s. Bungie getting bought out by MS and Halo becoming a PC game was a cruel stab in the back.
- soylentcola 10y ago
  Well, didn't it become an Xbox game long before it became a PC game? Don't get me wrong, I had my own fanboy tendencies back then and considered it grossly oversimplified compared to the oh-so-cool first person shooters I'd been enjoying on my cheap homebuilt PC at the time. Looking back, I think a big part of it was that I didn't want to shell out for yet another box (that only played games) and I sucked at using a gamepad for first person shooters. Still do, actually.
  - munificent 10y ago
    > Well, didn't it become an Xbox game long before it became a PC game? No, Bungie started working on Halo, and announced it at Macworld before the Xbox even existed.
some-guy 10y ago
Two things killed Mac gaming in my mind: the almost extinction of Apple itself in the mid-to-late 90s, as well as the rise of 3D accelerated games on PC in the late 90s. Macintosh couldn't keep up in both price or performance. I grew up on Mac gaming, being a cult-of-Mac evangelist, and most of the greats were cross-ported from PC (Blizzard, Maxis, id Software), or it had many gems of its own (Marathon, Bungie, Ambrosia). Once Half-Life came out however in 1998, I had to beg my parents for a gaming-capable PC. There just was no competition at that point.
- mikeash 10y ago
  I remember Half-Life as the demarcation point. Before that, we didn't have as many games and the scene wasn't as vibrant as it was on the PC, but we had high-quality stuff, often Mac-exclusive. When the Half-Life port was killed, it felt like we were definitively left behind. Stuff still showed up, but it felt like we were getting the dregs, late or poorly done or just not very many of them. Around this time, classic Mac game development houses like Ambrosia, Bungie, and Graphic Simulations folded, jumped ship, or just went into long decline. The Mac has seen a lot more games in recent years, and a big part of that is Valve's presence on the platform with Steam and, after all these years, Half-Life.
  - some-guy 10y ago
    I think cross-platform development is a lot easier as well, especially with mature tools available for developers. (Unity, UE4, MonoGame, etc) I use Linux, Windows, and Mac regularly in my everyday life, and most of the games I play are available on Steam and cross-platform.
erickhill 10y ago
I'm not trying to argue your points, but there was a lot of "serious gaming" in the 80s and 90s, too. I highly recommend Infocom's Trinity, Lurking Horror, most SSI titles, etc. The list is vast.
giancarlostoro 10y ago
Also the original X-Box had the same processor as the Macs did at the time, PowerPC if I'm not mistaken. There were X-Box developers with Macbooks, or so I've heard from someone I knew who worked for Lionhead and Microsoft.
- fzzzy 10y ago
  It was the GameCube that used PowerPC. The original Xbox used a Pentium III.
  - giancarlostoro 10y ago
    As someone else pointed out, it was the X-Box 360 that had PowerPC, I guess I forgot which one it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360
    - fzzzy 10y ago
      Yes. I didn't know that! It looks like it was a PowerPC that wasn't used in any macs though.
- stordoff 10y ago
  The original Xbox was x86. The Xbox 360 was PPC though (some of the early 360 demos were actually running on Powermac G5s - http://www.anandtech.com/show/1686/5 http://www.anandtech.com/show/1686/5 )
  - pandaman 10y ago
    In addition: Every 7th generation console had a PPC CPU but only Wii had one similar to Mac's [1]. X360 and PS3 had PPE cores from Cell, which had a PPC ISA but not the performance of the "real" PPC that were used in Macs. E.g. there was no OOE and the memory coherency was enforced by just locking a cache line after a write so if you tried to read something from an address you just wrote you'd stall for 50 clocks, the famous "load hit store" stall. Luckily, we had SPEs on PS3 and the GPU on the 360 to do heavy computation. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_(microprocessor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_(microprocessor)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

joshmn 10y ago

This was such a joy to read. Also, slightly more factual: http://kotaku.com/5796019/when-halo-was-on-the-mac-and-was-a-totally-different-game http://kotaku.com/5796019/when-halo-was-on-the-mac-and-was-a... I actually devoted way too much time playing (what was dubbed) "Halo PC" and spent a lot of time in the community. If any of you played at a semi-frequent level, I'd love to connect. We probably have some mutual friends. I know there's one of us (" ") who played at a very competitive high-level who now runs an thriving eCommerce startup!

crisnoble 10y ago

I remember playing Marathon[1] on a Mac, still one of my favorite games, lightyears ahead of any other game I had played at that time. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game)

sevensor 10y ago
My freshman dorm had a computer lab. One third of the computers were macs, and two thirds were PCs. The macs were for Marathon, and the PCs were for people doing homework. Except for the month when all of the computers were for watching "The Spirit of Christmas" over and over. While I'm dating myself, let me add that we could print for free on the dot matrix printer, but the laser charged against our print quotas.
- watersb 10y ago
  For you young folk: "The Spirit of Christmas" was an animated short that led to "South Park". Was commissioned by an advertising executive as a holiday gift to industry pals, distributed on video tape. Friend of mine transcoded it to QuickTime MOV format -- a technical challenge at the time -- and once digital, it spread like wildfire. QuickTime was a Mac-only video format at the time.
  - sevensor 10y ago
    That friend of yours -- he's a hero to my entire generation.
- memco 10y ago
  Our lab had free printing from the macs because they didn't have software available to track and charge people. Using a PC came with a printing tax. Good reason to use Macs back then.

munificent 10y ago

This was not fact was not fun if, like me, you were a Mac fanatic and gamer back in the 90s. Bungie getting bought out by MS and Halo becoming a PC game was a cruel stab in the back.

soylentcola 10y ago
Well, didn't it become an Xbox game long before it became a PC game? Don't get me wrong, I had my own fanboy tendencies back then and considered it grossly oversimplified compared to the oh-so-cool first person shooters I'd been enjoying on my cheap homebuilt PC at the time. Looking back, I think a big part of it was that I didn't want to shell out for yet another box (that only played games) and I sucked at using a gamepad for first person shooters. Still do, actually.
- munificent 10y ago
  > Well, didn't it become an Xbox game long before it became a PC game? No, Bungie started working on Halo, and announced it at Macworld before the Xbox even existed.

some-guy 10y ago

Two things killed Mac gaming in my mind: the almost extinction of Apple itself in the mid-to-late 90s, as well as the rise of 3D accelerated games on PC in the late 90s. Macintosh couldn't keep up in both price or performance. I grew up on Mac gaming, being a cult-of-Mac evangelist, and most of the greats were cross-ported from PC (Blizzard, Maxis, id Software), or it had many gems of its own (Marathon, Bungie, Ambrosia). Once Half-Life came out however in 1998, I had to beg my parents for a gaming-capable PC. There just was no competition at that point.

mikeash 10y ago
I remember Half-Life as the demarcation point. Before that, we didn't have as many games and the scene wasn't as vibrant as it was on the PC, but we had high-quality stuff, often Mac-exclusive. When the Half-Life port was killed, it felt like we were definitively left behind. Stuff still showed up, but it felt like we were getting the dregs, late or poorly done or just not very many of them. Around this time, classic Mac game development houses like Ambrosia, Bungie, and Graphic Simulations folded, jumped ship, or just went into long decline. The Mac has seen a lot more games in recent years, and a big part of that is Valve's presence on the platform with Steam and, after all these years, Half-Life.
- some-guy 10y ago
  I think cross-platform development is a lot easier as well, especially with mature tools available for developers. (Unity, UE4, MonoGame, etc) I use Linux, Windows, and Mac regularly in my everyday life, and most of the games I play are available on Steam and cross-platform.

erickhill 10y ago

I'm not trying to argue your points, but there was a lot of "serious gaming" in the 80s and 90s, too. I highly recommend Infocom's Trinity, Lurking Horror, most SSI titles, etc. The list is vast.

giancarlostoro 10y ago

Also the original X-Box had the same processor as the Macs did at the time, PowerPC if I'm not mistaken. There were X-Box developers with Macbooks, or so I've heard from someone I knew who worked for Lionhead and Microsoft.

fzzzy 10y ago
It was the GameCube that used PowerPC. The original Xbox used a Pentium III.
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  As someone else pointed out, it was the X-Box 360 that had PowerPC, I guess I forgot which one it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360
  - fzzzy 10y ago
    Yes. I didn't know that! It looks like it was a PowerPC that wasn't used in any macs though.
stordoff 10y ago
The original Xbox was x86. The Xbox 360 was PPC though (some of the early 360 demos were actually running on Powermac G5s - http://www.anandtech.com/show/1686/5 http://www.anandtech.com/show/1686/5 )
- pandaman 10y ago
  In addition: Every 7th generation console had a PPC CPU but only Wii had one similar to Mac's [1]. X360 and PS3 had PPE cores from Cell, which had a PPC ISA but not the performance of the "real" PPC that were used in Macs. E.g. there was no OOE and the memory coherency was enforced by just locking a cache line after a write so if you tried to read something from an address you just wrote you'd stall for 50 clocks, the famous "load hit store" stall. Luckily, we had SPEs on PS3 and the GPU on the 360 to do heavy computation. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_(microprocessor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_(microprocessor)