It may be strange to imagine, but there has never been a point in the Mac’s life where shooters weren’t available for it. I mean, when you think Mac, even if you think games, you probably don’t think shooters, except maybe Marathon (more on that later). Shooters loomed surprisingly large in the Classic Mac era (loosely defined as pre-2001, when Mac OS X officially launched).
Even before the user-friendly personal computing platform’s January 1984 launch, it had two dif-ferent versions of the 1970s Maze (aka Maze Wars)minicomputer game — a first-person multi-player free-for-all where you wander a maze shooting rival players. Both pre-1984 Mac versions were built internally at Apple, both were popular within the company, and both soon leaked to the public. In fact, the story goes that the world’s rst LAN party in-volved these two Maze conversions, Bus’d Out andMazeWars. It happened in a pizza parlor one eve-ning during the rst Macworld Expo (February 21- 23, 1985) on approximately 20 Macs, connected via homemade versions of the AppleTalk local area networking suite that Apple had announced that week.
Bus’d Out and MazeWars both a ained a cult following in the early Mac commu-nity, were passed around within user groups and played religiously anywhere there were at least two Macs and an AppleTalk cable at hand.
Public domain game MacBugs (1985) — a top- down, single-screen, mouse-controlled Robotron-like shooter, about gh ng so ware bugs, also made waves in the community, spread the world over via Macintosh user groups, while early com-mercial Mac shooters like MacA ack (a 1984Ba lezone clone) and Ground Control (Space In- vaders, also 1984) impressed more for their crisp black-and-white graphics than brilliant gameplay.
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