I loved the look of early mac games and was disappointed that the masses seemed to care more for clunky crappy color than the beautiful detailed look of high resolution black and white.
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Comparing Mac with the other games of the era I can kinda see where yourâe coming from. However for me sound is just as much a factor as anything else, and sure the Mac had great resolution, but but its sound capability (at least on the 128 and 512k models) were⌠pithetic.
Oblig internet weirdness, âMACINTOSH PLUSâ:
It really needed a MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw, HyperCard kind of effort on Appleâs part to set a standard for business use of the machine. Instead it felt like publishers of Apple II software trying to step up to the new platform, and the first efforts were not so good. Granted, 1 of 2 years is not enough time for a platform to mature. But Apple certainly was not helping them and it just circled the drain.
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I remember having fun with this HyperCard game, but I was in my early thirties when it came outâŚ
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I think I logged the most time on Dungeon of Doom/The Dungeon Revealed with Crystal Quest a close second. SimAnt was a bit later, but played it on B&W a lot as well.
I adored Spelunx. Both Miller brothers were surprised when I brought it up in interviews because unfortunately it was a commercial failure. Such a wonderfully playful, imaginative game â or rather more software toy. It rewarded exploration not only in a spatial sense but also in a creative one. You could compose songs and craft animations with drag and drop pieces, learn about science by interacting with little micro-simulations, bring paintings to life, and so much more. Even opening a desk drawer in Spelunx was exciting because it triggered something playful.
They planned to add more caves over time that you could patch in, like a forerunner to todayâs downloadable content on consoles, but that never panned out because sales were too low. It didnât help that the people doing the DOS port had to give up after a year because they couldnât get it to run at an acceptable level of performance.
If you like Cyanâs pre-Myst stuff, Iâd suggest you also keep an eye out for the next episode of my Ludiphilia podcast. Iâm putting together a story on their first HyperCard kids exploration game, The Manhole â how it was made, why they made it, what influenced them, etc.
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Ancient Art of War was one of my favorites for both systems. It looked so much nicer on the b/w Macs than color PCâs.
What, not a single reference to Cliff Johnsonâs âFoolâs Errandâ, âPuzzle Galleryâ or â3 in Threeâ?
When I first got my Mac, Dark Castle and Foolâs Errand was on everybodyâs machine (I went to a university where owning a Mac was mandatory at the time). So many hours solving puzzles.
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They definitely had a massive amount of charm.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
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Hypercard was awesome for game creation. When I was in junior high our computer lab was all Mac SEs and I spent a lot of time putting together Myst-style games in Hypercard (back before Myst was a thing). This was where I learned to use ResEdit to extract audio from other software so I could embed it into my games.
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Sounds great, thanks!
Donât worry. He gets a whole chapter. At The Carnival was actually one of the first games I played.
To be fair, there was a whole log of bad decisions industry wide around that time in terms of âhome multimediaâ hybrid game machines. Apple was right to not give lots of resources to Pippin. With only Bandai signed on as a game creator, it stood zero chance of competing against the 3DO platform with multiple hardware and software vendors behind it.
Airborne was awesome! And it was neat how the cactus turned into a Christmas tree if you played on Christmas.
I think discourse has just destroyed your argument, as its scaling engine has just substituted grays for the original crisp black and white.
Iâm just using my imagination, as someone once suggested 
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