The Secret History of Mac Gaming: Expanded Edition

by Richard Moss

Written by award-winning journalist and game historian Richard Moss, The Secret History of Mac Gaming draws on a combination of archive material and around 80 interviews with key figures from the era to tell the story of those communities and the game developers who survived and thrived in an ecosystem that was serially ignored by the outside world. This newly-expanded edition adds around 70 pages of extra content, including a foreword by The 7th Guest co-creator and id Software and Apple alum Graeme Devine, plus an annotated timeline, over 60 extra images, an icon gallery, and more than 6,000 extra words added to the chapter narratives ― on top of the 115,000 words from the 1st edition ― covering a variety of additional game and developer stories.

Genres: History, Video Games, Nonfiction, Games

480 pages, Hardcover

Published November 8, 2021

Reviews

[Daniel Saults · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful, well-written, and surprisingly thorough history of large and small names through the history of the Mac OS 6-9 and its unique, insular ecosystem of games. The illustrations (at least in my copy) were rather lamentably dark and muddy, but I have few complaints about the content, which ranges from early experimental forays to prominent commercial publishers to a wide array of noteworthy shareware titles. From my biased position, it's hard to speculate how much appeal this would have to someone lacking the benefit of nostalgia for this very distinct era and niche of computer games, but for anyone with fond memories of the gaming on the early Mac, I can recommend it with little reservation. Some of the guest chapters in the expanded edition verge a bit on bloviating, but they do offer valuable insider perspective that benefits the comprehensiveness of the content. I did spot a few extremely trivial factual errors (describing Bungie's hit "Marathon" as de-emphasizing gore would stand out as wildly incongruous to most who have played it - "Total Carnage" was the highest difficulty level for a reason!), but at worst they're nitpicks. I'd love to see a followup specifically about the shareware scene - there's an ocean of untapped content this book can only scratch the surface of, which is not a point against it considering its bredth. All in all, it's a fun, accessible, and breezy overview of a tragically under-examined but historically important topic in the history of games.

[Mark DeHate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a narrowly targeted book lol. I love it. As part of a family that had an old Mac around growing up, I spent a lot of time playing so many of these old titles, or at least browsing them in the MacWarehouse catalogs. A huge nostalgia tickle reading through this book.

Each section is focused on a different slice of Apple gaming history, and has so much detail about the background of each. Really well researched, with a ton of quotes from the people involved, and plenty of screenshots along the way. And a pretty easy to notice common thread, of so many stories of people pouring their heart and soul into Mac gaming, and more often than not ending with them just kinda giving up because it was a really tough career.

If you count yourself as a classic Mac gamer, this is a no regrets purchase for your bookshelf.

[TheManSG · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book that chronicles the little know history of games on the Macintosh and the ripple effect it has on the industry. And I do mean ripple effect, cause Bungie ain't famous for Marathon.