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[personal profile] krpalmer
It's easy enough to say "I'm more likely to play an old computer game than a new one," but in trying to lay out my explanations for that I do seem pushed to the further admission "but I can't find the time for much of even that; instead, I just seem to read about those old games." While reading, though, I did happen to learn about a crowd-funded book about games on the Macintosh, which very much caught my attention. Given the cost of having a printed copy shipped across the Atlantic, I was happy to settle for an electronic version. Once I'd made my pledge, however, it was a wait for the book to be finished and edited, and when I did have my copy I was trying to tie up a loose end by reading another book on a similar subject, if one about a computer I hadn't played games on. The release version of Brian Bagnall's Commodore: The Amiga Years (the middle volume of a promised trilogy) had at least taken out the barbed anecdote in a preliminary draft made available to Kickstarter backers about the disk-swapping that would have set in had someone tried loading an application on a single-drive Macintosh from a disk without a System Folder; while strictly true, I'd been inclined to insist there was supposed to have been space for the system and application on a single disk. Once through that book, though, I could move on at last to Richard Moss's The Secret History of Mac Gaming.

I may have long supposed part of my attachment to older computer games amounts to a detachment from new games, and then supposed part of that came from how beginning to use a Macintosh seems to mean accepting a certain distance from the full flood of computer gaming. (So far as my own family went, though, in moving on from Radio Shack and Tandy Color Computers, games on which I first associated with arcade knockoffs in a narrow palette most often amounting to black, white, red, and blue and then a handful of official ports and some more knockoffs in an amazing sixteen of sixty-four colours, we didn't seem to have lost too much.) I can also suppose someone reading the book without benefit of nostalgia might only conclude "indeed, they didn't have a lot of games" (although in emphasizing those "made on a Mac" the book touched only in passing on "porting houses" that could have helped fill out the catalogues). The book, though, seemed determined to point out the interesting and unusual developments those games struck on, and in time I got from "games I eventually managed to try" to "games I'd played and enjoyed at the time." (In the process, I realized the black-and-white pixel artworks heading each chapter hadn't been lifted straight from the games themselves when they stayed black-and-white for games in the colour era.) Along with Myst, the Marathon series and other Bungie games, and the shareware of Ambrosia Software (although it didn't delve quite far enough into Escape Velocity to mention its Mystery Science Theater 3000 Easter eggs), one game I hadn't played but had at least heard about did give me a moment's pause when I saw Tommy Yune had been involved with it. He'd wound up (among the various other fates tracked at the close of each chapter) basically in charge of various Robotech projects after the millennium (even with numerous people adding "such as they are" qualifiers).

If there was one bit of greater context the book did have me wondering about (even as I had to accept it's another thing altogether to demand someone else do that much more research for you), it was to consider "computer games" as a whole right around when the Macintosh was being finalized and first sold. I have the general impression the IBM PC, looming ahead of the people at Apple, had games available for it but wasn't even "a" major "first-release gaming platform" quite yet then. Too, I'm able to ponder the years that had followed since the Apple II itself had first appeared, and if vague dreams of "putting computers in the hands of many," with computer games of ever-increasing complexity just happening to always be one thing that could be done with them, had focused down to "selling computers to businesses" even given some machines kept going into homes. (Right after the introduction of the Macintosh, the Apple IIc appears to have been intended as a stylish, capable, and deliberate entry into the high end of the home market; that it didn't sell well there then leaves me wondering if that had turned most eyes at the company away from there for crucial years.) I have seen period comments that, in at least managing to sell as personal choices, Macintoshes did get into well-heeled homes early on. In connection with that, though, I did think back to some personal speculation indulged in about Pierre Trudeau having bought one and a following thought that maybe Justin Trudeau had in fact found the computer at his school along with some games that had just happened to be there, as Marathon had just happened to get into the networked "Mac lab" at my high school when my brother was going there in the 1990s.

The book is more or less in chronological order, although one chapter on the perhaps-infamous, perhaps-just-unfortunate Pippin games console felt somehow early. It did have to close with admitting that, for all the respectability OS X brought the Macintosh (and provided room for Apple's expansion), in knocking titles off the back shelf it more or less closed an era of uniqueness. I had to realize and accept that myself, but I can also go back to what I said at the beginning and admit "it's not that every single computer game I might want to play is cruelly beyond my grasp; it's just that I can't make the time to play them."
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