*BONG!* "Welcome to Macintosh. |
Traditionally, the Apple "Mac" Macintosh computer has been known for desktop publishing, Photoshop, audio and video editing, networking, and high prices, not gaming. (In fact, Apple management for some time actively discouraged any attempts to turn the Mac into a gaming machine, because they envisioned it as a business tool and feared that gaming would add to the already somewhat whimsical image of the computer.) But despite this it has a gaming history, including a small number of original titles, most famously Myst and Marathon. Another ironic moment is that, due to being based on the popular Motorola 68000 CPU, widely used at the time in various video game platforms, the Mac had a long history as an authoring platform for console games in the eight-bit and 16-bit era.
The Mac was a revolutionary computer, with its Xerox Alto-inspired graphical user interface, (though Mac OS X made it so modern Macs have a terminal feature to provide text-based functions other UNIX-based operating systems have) and Apple marketing executives were worried that it would be seen as a toy. So the only games developed for it prior to its release in January 1984 were a 600-byte Puzzle Game and a real-time board game by an Apple programmer that went intentionally underpromoted. After the launch, games were ported over from other systems, but there were only a few unique titles.
Several companies stepped forward to fill the gap. Silicon Beach's Enchanted Scepters and Dark Castle demonstrated the Mac's mouse-based input and multimedia capabilities, respectively. ICOM Simulations created the first fully mouse-driven Adventure Game in Deja Vu, followed by Shadowgate and two other "MacVentures". In the 1990s, Bungie gave Mac users a reason to be proud with Marathon and Myth. Halo would've been their next Mac title, but Microsoft bought them out and turned it into a launch title for the Xbox. Other major developers included Ambrosia (Escape Velocity) and Casady & Greene (Crystal Quest, Glider). Still another Mac debut, Cyan's HyperCard-based Myst, went on to reign as the all-time best-selling PC game for nearly a decade.
The Mac hardware went from the 68k CPU family to the PowerPC, and Mac OS went from Classic to X, but it remained a system of third-party ports from those who were willing. And as the "wintel" platform caught up with the Mac's technical sophistication, porting became more difficult and fewer were willing.
Things took a startling change in the mid-2000s. In 2006, the Mac went to the same 80x86 CPU as the IBM Personal Computer, even allowing it to run Windows without the need for an x86 emulator, and thus the vast majority of computer games (i.e. other than what was already available for Mac OS). This made porting easier, but still not a piece of cake; the Mac OS still uses different Application Programming Interfaces, such as OpenGL, in place of DirectX. It also used a different, more sophisticated BIOS called EFI in place of the outdated IBM PC BIOS that PCs were stuck with until Microsoft updated Windows Vista and 7. An upside of the transition was the sudden prominence of the Hackintosh, a standard PC running Mac OS X (versions 10.4 and up); though technically not allowed under Apple's EULA, Hackintoshing opens up a lot of flexibility that Apple doesn't offer on the low end, and there's even a book out there on how to do it.
Much like earlier 80x86 competitors to Windows such as Linux, native game ports have mostly died away as a result, replaced with the common CPU architecture's ability to use various types of emulation to run Windows games at a decent speed or simply reboot into Windows using the Boot Camp bootloader software. In particular, a commercial enhancement of Wine called Cider is bundled into most current Mac game "ports", so native Mac games have been reduced from those ported by third parties to those originally written by Multi Platform Mac developers, like Blizzard, id, and (in a recent surprise) Valve, bringing Steam to the Mac.
Named after the McIntosh apple, which you can find in the produce section of a grocery store near you. No relation to a Mac(kintosh) coat, Mac(aroni) and Cheese, a McDonald's Big Mac (though you won't believe how often this crops up in jokes in both fandom and hater circles alike), Big Macintosh, a blue dog named Mac, someone who has a blue imaginary friend or somebody on the street yelling "Hey, mac!" to you.
See its colorful history here.