. Mac gaming refers to use of video games on personal computers. In the 1990s, computers did not attract the same level of video game development as computers due to the high popularity of Windows and, for 3D gaming, Microsoft's technology.

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In recent years, the introduction of and support for processors has eased of many games, including 3D games through use of and more recently Apple's own API. Virtualization technology and also permit the use of Windows and its games on Macintosh computers.

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Today, a growing number of popular games run natively on MacOS, though as of early 2018, a majority still require the use of Windows. Contents. Early game development on the Mac Prior to the release of the computer, a number of marketing executives at Apple were concerned that including a game in the finished would aggravate the impression that the made the Mac toy-like. More critically, the limited amount of in the original Macintosh meant that fitting a game into the operating system would be very difficult. Eventually, created a called Puzzle that occupied only 600 of memory.

This was deemed small enough to be safely included in the operating system, and it shipped with the Mac when released in 1984. With Puzzle—the first computer game specifically for a mouse—the Macintosh became the first computer with a game in its, and it would remain a part of the Mac OS for the next ten years, until being replaced in 1994 with Jigsaw, a game included as part of. During the development of the Mac, a chess game similar to based on was shown to the development team. The game was written by for the computer, but could be easily ported to the Macintosh.

The completed game was shown at the Mac's launch and released a few months later under the title, but Apple failed to put much marketing effort into ensuring its success and the game was not a top seller. By the mid-1980s most computer companies avoided the term 'home computer' because of its association with the image of, as Compute! Wrote, 'a low-powered, low-end machine primarily suited for playing games'. Apple's, for example, denied that his company sold home computers; rather, he said, Apple sold 'computers for use in the home'. In 1990 the company reportedly refused to support joysticks on its low-cost and computers to prevent customers from considering them as 'game machine's. Apart from a developer discount on Apple hardware, support for games developers was minimal.

Game development on the Macintosh nonetheless continued, with titles such as (1986), (1986) and (1989), though mostly games for the Mac were developed alongside those for other platforms. Notable exceptions were (1993), developed on the Mac (in part using ) and only afterwards to Windows, which spawned the franchise,. As Apple was the first manufacturer to ship CD-ROM drives as standard equipment (on the and later models), many of the early CD-ROM based games were initially developed for the Mac, especially in an era of often confusing standards.

In 1996 reported that, while there had been Mac-only games and PC ports with major enhancements on Macintosh, 'until recently, most games available for the Mac were more or less identical ports of PC titles'. 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 (also known as the Bandai Pippin) was a multimedia player based on the that ran a cut-down 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 42,000 units sold and fewer than a thousand games and software applications supported. Attempts by Apple to promote gaming on Mac. This section needs expansion. You can help. (October 2012) Apple has at times attempted to market the platform for gaming. In 1996, they released a series of game-enabling APIs called. In April 1999, gave an interview with the UK-based magazine to promote the PowerPC G3-based computers Apple were selling with then new ATI Rage 128 graphics cards, and describing how Apple was 'trying to build the best gaming platform in the world so developers are attracted to write for it' and 'trying to leapfrog the PC industry'.

In 2015, Apple brought its low-level graphics API to the Mac with, which was originally introduced for in 2014. Metal is supposed to succeed OpenGL on the Mac platform and enable game performance competitive with. Original Mac games Although currently most big-name Mac games are ports, this has not always been the case. Perhaps the most popular game which was originally developed for the Macintosh was 1993's,. It was ported to Windows the next year, and Cyan's later games were released simultaneously for both platforms with the exception of, which was Windows-only until a Mac-compatible re-release (currently in ) by in 2007, with the help of TransGaming's Cider virtualization software. From the 1980s an atmospheric game (, 1989) and a graphical adventure game (, 1987) were among the most prominent games developed first for Macintosh and later ported for other platforms.

Another popular Mac game was the series of. These games were released in the wake of the popular, which defined the first-person 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.

Would port the second in the series, to the Windows platform, where it met with some success. They also ported their post-Marathon games and to Windows.

At the 1999 in New York City, Bungie showed a demonstration of a new game entitled, to be released for the Mac the next year; before this happened, Bungie was purchased by Microsoft. Halo was released exclusively for the 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 lower-budget with simple graphics that are easy to pick up and play in short bursts, as opposed to high-budget '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 is 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 physics engine and the 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.

However, in some cases, GameSpy has been and implemented into the Mac game, so that it is able to network seamlessly with the Windows version of the game. In-house porting Only a few companies have developed or continue to develop games for both the Mac and Windows platforms.

Notable examples of these are,. Those creating the Mac version have direct access to the original in case any questions or concerns arise about the. 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 third-party porting process are avoided. If carried out simultaneously with game development, the company can release, easing game distribution and largely eliminating the. Among the Mac versions of popular Windows games that were developed in-house are,.

Third-party porting Most high-budget 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,. 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 50,000 units.

The between the original game developer and the porting house may be a flat one-time payment, a percentage of the profits from the Mac game's sale, or both. While this license gives the porting house access to artwork and source code, it does not normally cover such as third-party game engines. 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 -compatible processors. The latter presented an obstacle in previous years when the Macintosh platform utilized processors due to the difference in between the two types of processors, but as today's 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 's graphics to instructions for the 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 third-party companies are usually released anywhere from three months to more than a year after their Windows-based counterparts. For example, the Windows version of 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 version of, a product which allows Intel-based Macintoshes to directly into. 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. The number of Mac ports of Windows games released in 2006 was never likely to be very great, despite the steadily increasing number of Mac users.

Emulation and virtualization Over the years there have been a number of for the Macintosh that allowed it to run or software, most notably,. Although more or less adequate for business applications, these programs have tended to deliver poor performance when used for running games, particularly where high-end technologies like DirectX were involved. Since the introduction of the Intel processor into the Macintosh platform, Windows software such as and have been seen as more promising solutions for running Windows software on the Mac operating system. In some ways they are better solutions than Boot Camp, as they do not require rebooting the machine. VMware Fusion's public beta 2 supports hardware-accelerated which utilize the library up to version 9. Parallels Desktop for Mac version 3.0 has announced support for GPU acceleration, allowing Mac users to play Windows-based games. Wine-based projects.

Main article: has developed a product called Cider which is a popular method among publishers to port games to Mac. Cider's engine enables publishers and developers to target Mac OS X. It shares much of the same core technology as TransGaming's Linux Portability Engine,.

Public reception of games ported with Cider is mixed, due to inconsistency of performance between titles; because of this, 'Ciderized' games are neither seen as the work of cross-platform development, nor as native, optimized ports. Both Cider and Cedega are based on Wine. Announced their return to the Mac, publishing various titles simultaneously on both Windows and Mac, using Cider. An Wine-based project called Wineskin allows anyone to attempt to port games to Mac OS X since 2010. It uses all open source components and is open source itself. Its technology is very similar to what TransGaming does with Cider, but it is free to use to anyone. Wineskin creates self-contained ('clickable') Mac Applications out of the installation.

The 'wrappers' that can be made from this are often shared with friends or others. Legal versions of games can then be installed easily into the shared wrapper and then the final result works like a normal Mac app. Wineskin is mainly only used in 'Hobbyist Porting' and not professional porting, but some professional game companies have used it in major releases.

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Since the end of 2014, there is a PaulTheTall.com app called Porting Kit which automatically creates ready-to-use Wineskin wrappers for some specific games. ' 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. Is a free version of the same technology, also based on Wine. A list of Wine-compatible Windows software, including over 5,000 games and how well each individual game works with Wine can be found at appdb.winehq.org. 1,500 games are listed as 'Platinum', which means they work 'out-of-the-box', while 1,400 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 ',' 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 high-cost, top-selling products such as. Because of this, most smaller Mac game companies release their products using a 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 model may lead to some companies eventually releasing games as paid downloads in a model similar to 's service. Are largely immune to the shelf space problem, and 's was one of the first games made available for Mac OS X, in 2002 was one of the few porting companies to offer commercial games via digital download, although with the launch of and 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 are eliminated. The latest player is ' GameTreeOnline.com 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.

Linux gaming and free software games In more recent years, Mac gaming has become more intertwined with gaming on another UNIX-like platform:. This trend began when Linux began to gain Mac-style porting houses, the first of which was and later. 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 who brought and to Linux and Mac; companies like, who primarily supports as well as Mac and Linux; or, a German publisher that has done ports for Linux Game Publishing. Recently Mac-focused porter has also started releasing titles for Linux, starting with. Has also released and for Linux. Has also been conducive to intertwining, with developers like (, ), (, ), , , and supporting both platforms with native versions.

Was also a pioneer in both Mac and Linux gaming, with ports of their games once done. Is also notable for supporting both platforms.

Have also proved modestly popular on the Mac. Although, due to the nature of the system, development of free software titles mostly begins on Linux; afterwards, major games are typically ported to Mac.

Mac has less mainstream games than Windows and as a result, free games have had more of an impact on the platform. Notable free games popular on the Mac include, and more. Valve Corporation A 2007 interview with 's (, and the ) 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 we'll 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 there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're 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, a member on the Steam forums found new files pertaining to Mac OS X in the program files of the beta. After several days of speculation by the gaming community, a series of six images were sent out by on March 3, 2010, hinting at a Mac version of Steam.

These pictures, each depicting characters from their games reenacting famous apple advertisements, were sent to major computer and gaming websites, both Mac- and PC-related, with -like page dots at the bottom of each. The six recipients were,. On March 8, 2010, made the official announcement in a press release on their 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, Valve's game-delivery platform was ported to OS X, along with, and a variety of other Source-engine-based games over a succession of weeks. With the release of Steam for Mac OS X the award-winning game 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 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 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. Notable current original game developers.

Websites dedicated to Mac gaming See also. References. ^ Andy Hertzfeld (2004).

Revolution in the Valley, O'Reilly. Mace, Scott (May 7, 1984). Retrieved February 6, 2015.

Halfhill, Tom R. (December 1986). Retrieved November 9, 2013. Computer Gaming World. December 1990. Retrieved November 16, 2013. ^ 'Can Apple Run with the Big Guns?'

October 1996. CSE/ISE 364 Lectures & Recitations (2007). , Centre for Visual Computing, Stony Brook, State University of New York. 'Letters'.

'An Interview with Satjiv Chahil'. October 1996. Owen Linzmayer (2004). Apple Confidential 2.0, No Starch Press.

Shepherd, Carrie (April 1999). 'Profile: Steve Jobs'.

Arcade: 42–43. ^ Peter Cohen (2006)., Macworld. Arik Hesseldahl (2006)., Business Week. Neale Monks (2006). MyMac.com. Tuncer Deniz (2006).

Inside Mac Games. Apple Inc. Peter Cohen (2006). Macworld.

Neale Monks (2004). October 8, 2007, at the., AppleLust.com. Inside Mac Games. –. –.

September 28, 2007. Retrieved 2007-10-02.

External links. at.

Features. Make Mac OS X ports/wrappers for Windows™ software. Integrated Wine (upgradable/downgradable). Integrated X11 (Xquartz). included installer, and easy configuration options. Includes usable Winetricks as well. Support for fullscreen apps/games, including resolution switching.

Make Custom EXE launchers along with the wrapper, for like a setup.exe. Aga arabesque font for mac. wrappers are moveable from computer to computer, just like a native app. Menu driven basic Wine usage on your machine. Make and share wrappers with others.