mac gaming part of a series onvideo games platforms arcade game console game game console home console electronic game audio game electronic handheld handheld game handheld console mobile game online game social network game pc game linux mac genres action beat em up fighting platform shooter survival actionadventure stealth survival horror adventure interactive fiction interactive movie visual novel roleplaying action roleplaying tactical roleplaying simulation construction and management life simulation sports vehicle strategy multiplayer online battle arena realtime strategy realtime tactics turnbased strategy turnbased tactics massively multiplayer online lists arcade video games bestselling video games bestselling video game franchises highestgrossing video game franchises mostplayed video games by player count mostplayed mobile games by player count highestgrossing arcade games video games considered among the best game of the year awards video games notable for negative reception development game ai game design interaction design game programming level design video game art video game design video game graphics video game music vte mac gaming refers to use of video games on macintosh personal computers in the 1990s apple computers did not attract the same level of video game development as windows computers due to the high popularity of windows and for 3d gaming microsofts directx technology in recent years the introduction of mac os x and support for intel processors has eased porting of many games including 3d games through use of opengl and more recently apples own metal api virtualization technology and boot camp also permit the use of windows and its games on macintosh computers today a growing number of popular games run natively on macos though as of early 2018 a majority still require the use of windows early game development on the mac prior to the release of the first macintosh computer a number of marketing executives at apple were concerned that including a game in the finished operating system would aggravate the impression that the graphical user interface made the mac toylike and it would remain a part of the mac os for the next ten years until being replaced in 1994 with jigsaw a jigsaw puzzle game included as part of system 75 during the development of the mac a chess game similar to archon based on alice in wonderland was shown to the development team the game was written by steve capps for the apple lisa computer but could be easily ported to the macintosh the completed game was shown at the macs launch and released a few months later under the title through the looking glass but apple failed to put much marketing effort into ensuring its success and the game was not a top seller by the mid1980s most computer companies avoided the term home computer because of its association with the image of as compute wrote a lowpowered lowend machine primarily suited for playing games apples john sculley for example denied that his company sold home computers rather he said apple sold computers for use in the home mac gaming was enabled with the arrival of the 3d era since much less changes to the coding are required to port a 3d game to macintosh than to port a 2d game pippin the apple pippin also known as the bandai pippin was a multimedia player based on the power mac that ran a cutdown version of the mac os designed among other things to play games sold between 1996 and 1998 in japan and the united states it was not a commercial success with fewer than 42000 units sold and fewer than a thousand games and software applications supported attempts by apple to promote gaming on mac apple has at times attempted to market the platform for gaming in 1996 they released a series of gameenabling apis called game sprockets in 2015 apple brought its lowlevel graphics api metal to the mac with os x el capitan which was originally introduced for ios in 2014 metal is supposed to succeed opengl on the mac platform and enable game performance competitive with vulkan or direct3d 12 original mac games although currently most bigname mac games are ports this has not always been the case perhaps the most popular game which was originally developed for the macintosh was 1993s myst by cyan it was ported to windows the next year and cyans later games were released simultaneously for both platforms with the exception of uru ages beyond myst which was windowsonly until a maccompatible rerelease currently in beta by gametap in 2007 with the help of transgamings cider virtualization software from the 1980s an atmospheric air hockey game shufflepuck caf brderbund 1989 and a graphical adventure game shadowgate mindscape 1987 were among the most prominent games developed first for macintosh and later ported for other platforms another popular mac game was the marathon series of firstperson shooters these games were released in the wake of the popular doom which defined the firstperson shooter genre but contained many innovations new or uncommon in similar games from the time such as weapons with two functions and the ability for the player to look and fire up and down swim through liquids fight alongside allied characters and wield two weapons at once bungie would port the second in the series marathon 2 durandal to the windows platform where it met with some success they also ported their postmarathon games myth and oni to windows at the 1999 macworld conference expo in new york city bungie showed a demonstration of a new game entitled halo to be released for the mac the next year before this happened bungie was purchased by microsoft halo was released exclusively for the xbox video game console in 2001 the macintosh and windows versions of the game did not arrive until late 2003 almost four and a half years after its original announcement at macworld today there are many companies both large and small creating original games for the macintosh however following a trend in the industry these tend to be lowerbudget casual games with simple graphics that are easy to pick up and play in short bursts as opposed to highbudget hardcore games that are more graphically intensive and require large investments in time to play and master windows games a particular problem for companies attempting to port windows games to the macintosh is licensing middleware middleware is offtheshelf software that handles certain aspects of games making it easier for game creators to develop games in return for paying the middleware developer a licensing fee however since the license the mac porting house obtains from the game creator does not normally include rights to use the middleware as well the mac porting company must either license the middleware separately or attempt to find an alternative examples of middleware include the havok physics engine and the gamespy internetbased multiplayer gaming client because of the smaller market companies developing games for the mac usually seek a lower licensing fee than windows developers when the middleware company refuses such terms porting that particular windows game to the mac may be uneconomical and engineering a viable alternative within the available budget impossible as a result some popular games which use the havok engine have not yet been ported to the macintosh in other cases workaround solutions may be found in the case of gamespy one workaround is to limit mac gamers to play against each other but not with users playing the windows version inhouse porting only a few companies have developed or continue to develop games for both the mac and windows platforms notable examples of these are transgaming aspyr big fish games blizzard entertainment brderbund linden lab and microsoft those creating the mac version have direct access to the original programmers in case any questions or concerns arise about the source code this increases the likelihood that the mac and windows versions of a game will launch concurrently or nearly so as many obstacles inherent in the thirdparty porting process are avoided if carried out simultaneously with game development the company can release hybrid discs easing game distribution and largely eliminating the shelf space problem among the mac versions of popular windows games that were developed inhouse are diablo microsoft flight simulator second life stubbs the zombie call of duty 4 and world of warcraft thirdparty porting most highbudget games that come to the macintosh are originally created for microsoft windows and ported to the mac operating system by one of a relatively small number of porting houses among the most notable of these are aspyr feral interactive macsoft red marble games coladia games and macplay a critical factor for the financial viability of these porting houses is the number of copies of the game sold a successful title may sell only 50000 units the licensing deal between the original game developer and the porting house may be a flat onetime payment a percentage of the profits from the mac games sale or both modifying the source code to the macintosh platform may be difficult as code for games is often highly optimized for the windows operating system and intelcompatible processors the latter presented an obstacle in previous years when the macintosh platform utilized powerpc processors due to the difference in endianness between the two types of processors but as todays macintosh computers employ intel processors as well the obstacle has been mitigated somewhat one example of common work for a porting house is converting graphics instructions targeted for microsofts directx graphics library to instructions for the opengl library directx is favored by most windows game developers but is incompatible with the macintosh due to the time involved in licensing and porting the product macintosh versions of games ported by thirdparty companies are usually released anywhere from three months to more than a year after their windowsbased counterparts for example the windows version of civilization iv was released on october 25 2005 but mac gamers had to wait eight months until june 30 2006 for the release of the mac version boot camp in april 2006 apple released a beta version of boot camp a product which allows intelbased macintoshes to boot directly into windows xp or windows vista the reaction from mac game developers and software journalists to the introduction of boot camp has been mixed ranging from assuming the mac will be dead as a platform for game development to cautious optimism that mac owners will continue to play games within mac os rather than by rebooting to windows emulation and virtualization over the years there have been a number of emulators for the macintosh that allowed it to run msdos or windows software most notably realpc softpc softwindows and virtual pc although more or less adequate for business applications these programs have tended to deliver poor performance when used for running games particularly where highend technologies like directx were involved since the introduction of the intel processor into the macintosh platform windows virtualization software such as parallels desktop for mac and vmware fusion have been seen as more promising solutions for running windows software on the mac operating system winebased projects wine software transgaming technologies has developed a product called cider which is a popular method among publishers to port games to mac an open source winebased project called wineskin allows anyone to attempt to port games to mac os x which automatically creates readytouse wineskin wrappers for some specific games codeweavers crossover products use a compatibility layer to translate windows application instructions to the native macintosh operating system without the need to run windows crossover is built from the wine project and adds a graphical frontend to the process of installing and running the windows applications through wine codeweavers is an active supporter of wine and routinely shares programming code and patches back to the project playonmac is a free version of the same technology also based on wine a list of winecompatible windows software including over 5000 games and how well each individual game works with wine can be found at appdbwinehqorg 1500 games are listed as platinum which means they work outofthebox while 1400 more are listed as gold meaning they require some tweaking of the installation to run flawlessly the shelf space problem one problem afflicting both porting houses and original mac game developers is that of shelf space which refers to the amount of space a retail store allocates to stocking mac games due to its small market share macintosh software as a whole receives very little if any shelf space in most major computer retail stores within that space retailers are usually reluctant to stock relatively inexpensive games which may or may not sell well as opposed to highcost topselling products such as microsoft office and adobe photoshop because of this most smaller mac game companies release their products using a shareware business model either exclusively or in addition to a more traditional retail boxed version all porting houses and larger game companies have stuck to the traditional model but the recent rise in the digital download model may lead to some companies eventually releasing games as paid downloads in a model similar to valve corporations steam service mmorpgs are largely immune to the shelf space problem and ncsofts lineage was one of the first games made available for mac os x in 2002 virtual programming was one of the few porting companies to offer commercial games via digital download although with the launch of deliver2mac and gamersgate in early 2006 other companies are beginning to move towards digital distribution aside from getting around the shelf space problem shareware and digital download models also provide a larger percentage of profit to the company as the wholesaler middleman is avoided and costs and turnaround times involved in media replication are eliminated the latest player is transgaming technologies gametreeonlinecom which was launched march 2008 with a focus to offer the mac gaming community digital downloads of major published mac titles on the other hand many retail titles released for both windows and mac os x may come with both versions on one disc linux gaming and free software games in more recent years mac gaming has become more intertwined with gaming on another unixlike platform linux gaming this trend began when linux began to gain macstyle porting houses the first of which was loki software and later linux game publishing linux porters born from this new industry have also been commonly hired as mac porters often releasing games for both systems this includes game porters like ryan c gordon who brought unreal tournament 2003 and 2004 to linux and mac companies like hyperion entertainment who primarily supports amigaos as well as mac and linux or runesoft a german publisher that has done ports for linux game publishing recently macfocused porter aspyr has also started releasing titles for linux starting with civilization v feral interactive has also released xcom enemy unknown and middleearth shadow of mordor for linux indie game development has also been conducive to intertwining with developers like wolfire games lugaru overgrowth frictional games penumbra amnesia 2d boy world of goo sillysoft games lux and basilisk games eschalon supporting both platforms with native versions id software was also a pioneer in both mac and linux gaming with ports of their games once done by timothee besset illwinter game design is also notable for supporting both platforms open source video games have also proved modestly popular on the mac valve corporation a 2007 interview with valve corporations halflife counterstrike team fortress 2 and the source engine gabe newell included the question of why his company was keeping their games and gaming technology a strictly windows project gaben answered we tried to have a conversation with apple for several years and they never seemed to well we have this pattern with apple where we meet with them people there go wow gaming is incredibly important we should do something with gaming and then well say ok here are three things you could do to make that better and then they say ok and then we never see them again and then a year later a new group of people show up who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there and never follow through on anything so they seem to think that they want to do gaming but theres never any follow through on any of the things they say theyre going to do that makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms on february 23 2010 after the release of a public open beta version of steam on march 8 2010 valve corporation made the official announcement in a press release on their steam website in the announcement valve stated that they will be porting their entire library of games over to mac when the client is released and that they decided on native versions of their games rather than emulations valve also announced that any games purchased over steam for computers running windows will be available for free download to computers running mac os x and vice versa what was also stressed was that mac and windows users will be using the same servers will obtain updates simultaneously and will be part of the same multiplayer environment essentially promising a completely integrated steam environment in june 2010 valves steam gamedelivery platform was ported to os x along with portal team fortress 2 halflife 2 and a variety of other sourceenginebased games over a succession of weeks with the release of steam for mac os x the awardwinning game portal was made free for both users of pc and mac to download the first game to be released simultaneously for mac and windows by valve was portal 2 in april 2011 a good portion of games available through steam are now marked as being compatible with both windows and os x and can be downloaded for either platform once a customer has purchased the game at wwdc 2017 apple announced cooperating with valve to bring steamvr to the mac gog good old games the site gog good old games now includes a good selection of mac games although most of the titles are older ones revived to be playable on newer systems there also are many recent games often made by smaller developers notable current porting houses aspyr electronic arts feral interactive red marble games transgaming technologies codeweavers notable current original game developers ambrosia software freeverse software pangea software spiderweb software websites dedicated to mac gaming httpmacgamerhqcom httpmacgamecastcom httpcontrolcommandescapecom list of macintosh games linux gaming mac gaming at curlie 