- Joined
- Mar 10, 2013
A bit o' gaming history, explaining (at least partially) Why Things Is The Way They Is:
Before any of you lot were inflicting your foul presence on human society, I was there doing it for you. Somebody had to.
Gaming was not all that much fun on punched cards, but there were some pretty amusing things that ran on the teletypes. This was when you had to drive 40 miles across a high Northern Utah mountain pass in the winter to get to a "computer" where you knew how to pilfer logins. The Apple II was still only a gleam in that murderous thug Steve Jobs' eye. Fast forward a few years until We (used here in the royal or editorial sense) are seniors at the same local university, graduating a year or two later than originally planned because of foolishly going after two degrees. We had an original honesttogod IBM model 5150 personal computer, of which I still retain one screw and the Technical Reference manual (which is worth a couple bucks on eBay these days -- it had the BIOS listings, the schematics, and everything else you wanted to know along with a bunch of stuff you didn't. Then, lo and behold, Apple Computer announced this cute little thing that looked like a toaster -- graphics were strictly b&w and it was non-upgradeable to a degree not seen again until the iPhone. It struck me that it might be a hip gadget to write a game for. (More than eight years would pass before We gave up doing real work and became the only full-time programmer at a tiny game company called Activision or something.)
So, We girded our loins and strolled into the local Apple dealer to inquire about the purchase of one of these doodads. We informed the salesman that we wanted to write a game for it, and would of course (besides a machine) need the technical documentation, a C compiler, and an assembler. We of course expected him to dispatch his lackeys to haul this stuff out of the back room, but instead --
-- he laughed.
"You can't program a Mac."
Ho ho.
More correctly, you aren't allowed to program a Mac. In order to get the resources to do so, you have to present a propsal to high & mighty Apple explaning what you want to do, with the proper genuflections (while crawling backwards wearing white silk) and if they like it, they may deign to cast their pearls before you, swine. If your ideas was "a game," they ain't gonna like it, period. (There were exceptions, and I had many refreshing arguments with Bill Volk, my original boss at Activision, who had some successful Mac games to his credit.)
The later incarnations of the Apple II were great gaming machines -- the IIc springs to mind. Anybody that wanted to play computer games got themselves an Apple ][c. On the other hand, it'd been well-known for decades that no middle manager, ever, had been fired for spec-ing IBM gear. IBM meant business, Apple meant games. Jobs hated that, and wanted the Mac to be perceived as a business machine. So, no games. If you wanna make a game, Apple isn't going to let you. Their policy for several years was "No Games On The Mac."
And what the hell, it worked. They also managed to piss off practically all the game programmers of the time, and only until games started to be a serious market (and you could do forbidden things with a PC like make a 3D card for it) did they adopt their "Just Kidding! That never happened!" policy and allowed game development on what should have been a great gaming platform from the very beginning. The Mac is a fine machine, I have no arguments with it -- my problem is with Apple.
I could go on . . . I'd like very much to have a Mac, if I could get anything as powerful as my PC without shelling out enough cash to be the envy of other small nations and without having to set foot inside a heavenly Apple store, where the helpful staff has no genitalia and sniffs you to get data. But anyway, the reason there aren't many Mac games compared to what's on the PC is because that's exactly how Apple wanted it, and if you're not careful, you might get what you want.
APPLE'S MOST SUCCESSFUL MARKETING STRATEGY IN THE HISTORY OF EVER
and how they got exactly what they wanted
and how they got exactly what they wanted
Before any of you lot were inflicting your foul presence on human society, I was there doing it for you. Somebody had to.
Gaming was not all that much fun on punched cards, but there were some pretty amusing things that ran on the teletypes. This was when you had to drive 40 miles across a high Northern Utah mountain pass in the winter to get to a "computer" where you knew how to pilfer logins. The Apple II was still only a gleam in that murderous thug Steve Jobs' eye. Fast forward a few years until We (used here in the royal or editorial sense) are seniors at the same local university, graduating a year or two later than originally planned because of foolishly going after two degrees. We had an original honesttogod IBM model 5150 personal computer, of which I still retain one screw and the Technical Reference manual (which is worth a couple bucks on eBay these days -- it had the BIOS listings, the schematics, and everything else you wanted to know along with a bunch of stuff you didn't. Then, lo and behold, Apple Computer announced this cute little thing that looked like a toaster -- graphics were strictly b&w and it was non-upgradeable to a degree not seen again until the iPhone. It struck me that it might be a hip gadget to write a game for. (More than eight years would pass before We gave up doing real work and became the only full-time programmer at a tiny game company called Activision or something.)
So, We girded our loins and strolled into the local Apple dealer to inquire about the purchase of one of these doodads. We informed the salesman that we wanted to write a game for it, and would of course (besides a machine) need the technical documentation, a C compiler, and an assembler. We of course expected him to dispatch his lackeys to haul this stuff out of the back room, but instead --
-- he laughed.
"You can't program a Mac."
Ho ho.
More correctly, you aren't allowed to program a Mac. In order to get the resources to do so, you have to present a propsal to high & mighty Apple explaning what you want to do, with the proper genuflections (while crawling backwards wearing white silk) and if they like it, they may deign to cast their pearls before you, swine. If your ideas was "a game," they ain't gonna like it, period. (There were exceptions, and I had many refreshing arguments with Bill Volk, my original boss at Activision, who had some successful Mac games to his credit.)
The later incarnations of the Apple II were great gaming machines -- the IIc springs to mind. Anybody that wanted to play computer games got themselves an Apple ][c. On the other hand, it'd been well-known for decades that no middle manager, ever, had been fired for spec-ing IBM gear. IBM meant business, Apple meant games. Jobs hated that, and wanted the Mac to be perceived as a business machine. So, no games. If you wanna make a game, Apple isn't going to let you. Their policy for several years was "No Games On The Mac."
And what the hell, it worked. They also managed to piss off practically all the game programmers of the time, and only until games started to be a serious market (and you could do forbidden things with a PC like make a 3D card for it) did they adopt their "Just Kidding! That never happened!" policy and allowed game development on what should have been a great gaming platform from the very beginning. The Mac is a fine machine, I have no arguments with it -- my problem is with Apple.
I could go on . . . I'd like very much to have a Mac, if I could get anything as powerful as my PC without shelling out enough cash to be the envy of other small nations and without having to set foot inside a heavenly Apple store, where the helpful staff has no genitalia and sniffs you to get data. But anyway, the reason there aren't many Mac games compared to what's on the PC is because that's exactly how Apple wanted it, and if you're not careful, you might get what you want.
