Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 98: Mac Gaming in the 80s

Episode Date: May 8, 2017

Retronauts East's journey through the history of Apple-based gaming continues with an in-depth look at the unique world of monochrome Mac gaming. Ben Elgin, Benj Edwards, and Jeremy Parish discuss the miracle of the mouse and the hotness of HyperCard.

This week in Retronauts, it's the miggity, miggity, miggity, Mac Datties. Hi, everyone, and welcome to episode, oh, I want to say, a 98, 99. It's way up there for Retronauts. I am your host for this week, Jeremy Parrish. And with me, it's a Retronauts East. So that means it's Ben J. Edwards. And Ben Elgin. Keep those two straight. One has a J and the other does not. And this week, we are going to continue the series that we kind of started with our first episode on 8-bit microcomputers and the games that go with them. This episode is brought to you by Audible, the audio book service with more than

180,000 titles to choose from. Get a free audiobook and a 30-day trial at audibletrial.com slash game. Retronuts has been looking back at the Final Fantasy series lately in preparation for the series upcoming 30th anniversary. One of my favorite Final Fantasy characters is Shadow's dog Interceptor from Final Fantasy 6. You can't control him, but as a dog, he's a bruiser in combat. When his companion Shadow takes a hit, Interceptor rushes into battle to counterattack. He's hardcore. But you know, I bet Interceptor would have been a lot more chill if Shadow had subscribed to Barkbox.

Sure, that might have been a little tough since Barkbox is a monthly service that delivers dog treats to your door, and Shadow is a wandering nomadic ninja assassin. Also, Barkbox offers free shipping in the U.S., but not the world of ruin. But Barkbox would have given Interceptor a fresh assortment of toys and edible treats with a different theme every month, sourced from a variety of local and small businesses and customizable to his size, habits, and health needs. And if Interceptor hadn't liked a particular treat, he wouldn't have had to counterattack. Barkbox offers free replacements for unloved treats. If only Shadow had gone to GetBarkbox.com slash game, he could have signed up and gotten a free bonus month of service for subscribing.

Oh well, you aren't a surly nomadic ninja who barely survives the apocalypse, though, so why not subscribe for your own canine pal? That's getbarkbox.com slash game. So back a few months ago, we talked about the Apple 2, and it's, you know, it's sort of legacy and its important role in the history of video gaming. This time around, what we're planning to do is follow up on that with the next phase of Apple's video game history, the Macintosh. Of course, the Macintosh was not designed as a gaming system. I don't think it was not designed as a gaming system, but once Steve Jobs got his hands on it, he was like, no games.

Those are frivolous and dumb. And so, yeah, the system turned into a pretty neat gaming machine, sort of despite the mandate of its imperious commander, Steve Jobs. Not going to keep people for making games, especially when they're using it as a hobbyist machine. If you build it, they will develop games. that's the rule of computing. Also porn, but we're going to talk about games.

That's porn not. That's your next podcast series. That's my next Patreon goal. Right. So anyway, yeah, basically, I can say for myself, Mac gaming is not something I have a lot of experience with. It was something that I kind of saw from a distance and coveted, but Macintoshes were kind of expensive. And so they weren't really that easy. for me to get a hold of.

We had a few Macintoshes in some of our computer labs, and it wasn't until, like, 1993 that I got my own system and had sort of unfettered access to Macs. But this week, we're going to talk about 80s gaming on Macintosh. I think that'll probably fill an entire episode, because there's some really interesting games, some very innovative and unique games that were made for the system, again, sort of despite itself.

And I feel like that's going to fill an hour, hour and a half. So we'll see what happens. with the Mac. I'll start with, in 1987, I think my dad started a company, and he needed a way to produce data sheets for the products that he was making, which were like product brochures. So he saw that you could buy a Mac SE and a laser printer and use all this page maker at the time to design your own publications, essentially,

and then print them out very high quality. And then you could just take that hard copy from the laser printer to a printer, proper printer, and they would, you know, reproduce it. Or maybe they took the files, I guess they did that. But anyway, so we had a Mac SE, and we played, I think the only game we ever really bought for it was Shadowgate, and it was really neat. We'll talk about that in a minute. And we also had some shareware games.

and between 87, 88 and like the 94 or so when I first bought my vintage Mac, at first vintage Mac while I was collecting, I only played that SE a few times every once in a while when I was at my dad's company. They've eventually relegated to a back room and I would go in there and play Dungeon of Doom and stuff. It was fun. Nice. And Ben?

So yeah, we had a bunch of Macs when I was growing up. Um, so like in the earlier area, I had a TI, which is a different episode we'll get to. Um, and my dad had an Osborne, which is a really old clunky part. And I don't even know if we can fill a micro with an Osborne. Uh, yeah, no, I don't know about that. You can say a few sentences about the Osborne. 10 seconds. Uh, so obviously those weren't, those weren't, those weren't going forward. Um, we ended up, we had a very early, um, Mac plus. Um, and at some point, we upgraded it to a Mac S.E. And, you know, I've had Mac. I mean, those were shared with the family, but I've had Macs ever since then. I mean, I ended up with a centrist, and then on through Power Macs, and now we're into the 90s. But so, yeah, so I played a bunch of stuff on the old Macs. I was into the shareware scene. I tried writing some a few times. I don't know if any of them ever really got distributed. That's cool.

I didn't know. I think, yeah, I think I sent some into one of the catalogs that distributes shareware for you. You pay a nominal fee for discs and that's 90 desks. What were they called? What the games you made? The, uh, the big. biggest one I finished was Quest for the Golden Orb. It was a HyperCard thing. Yeah, we should definitely talk about HyperCard. Yeah, HyperCard is the best thing. So I was super

into HyperCard. Actually, in high school, I got a chemistry teacher to let me do an independent study writing software for his classes, basically, mostly in HyperCard, because that was what I knew. So, yeah, that was a lot of fun. So, yeah, early Macs were awesome. Just like a home for really great pixel art because they were pretty much the thing for high-res pixels at that point. You know, everything else, you either, you had your DOS boxes, which were all text and Askey base back then. And then you had things like your Commodores and Amigos, which had color graphics, but was low-res. Yeah, 320 by 200 kind of. Yeah. So the Mac. I don't remember the exact resolution of Mac, but it was like 512 by 224 or something. It changed a few times.

512 by 384 is the classic Mac, I think. Yeah. I think that was the first one. And then it went up quickly because I ran into this problem where like, you know, I had written a stack at home on my, like, I think it was an SE, and I tried to bring it to school and run it on one of their older ones, and it was a bigger resolution. He had to like pan and scan to see what I did, because

they up their resolution fairly quickly. 640 by 480 by default. Pretty quick. Yeah. On those modular machines. It was pretty unusual to see such a high resolution at that time on computers. Like the only other place you really saw was on Japanese PCs, which needed the high resolution

for their characters. Because, you know, they had complicated caragy characters. So that was sort of a necessity. But yeah, Macs, even though they were monochrome, literally like one big graphics. Black or white, that's it.

So you got this niche of just like really gorgeous one bit high resolution graphics that existed there and nowhere else. And a lot of people really played to that strength making things for. Yep. Have you seen that, that, the port of gauntlet for the Mac,

for example? It's like, maybe. It's crazy because it's, you know, it's all black or white, but it's like just, these ridiculously gorgeous little characters that are, you know, so much more detailed than the arcade.

Yeah, I didn't have that one. It's black and white. It was just a combination you didn't see other places. You tended to have some color options and lower resolution, but you didn't have a system with such high resolution, but monochrome output. It just, it wasn't a combination that existed anywhere else. And so between that and I think the Macintosh's emphasis on a visual interface, it just lent itself to a very unique, very beautiful. crafted artistic games. And that legacy carried through on into the 90s, you know, even after the sort of visual abilities of game system or computer systems sort of to level out, there was still this sort of unique high-res look to Macintosh games. Like if you look at the sprites and marathon and compare those to the sprites and do it, they just look different. Yeah. Like there is a different aesthetic, a different mindset. Because 640 by 480 was the

baseline in those days, the color max. So, I mean, that was, and VGA is 320 by 200, right? Yeah, you just had more to work with. So they were making those 320 by 200 up until the late 90s, you know, those games. Like, you had to play with

VGA. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. Yeah, it's, um, I like that you mentioned Aldous page maker because before I owned a Macintosh when I went out to college in, like, school, you know, elementary school, and junior high school or high school.

We had Macs in the computer labs, and in high school, I used a Mac, like an S.E., I think, probably, to put together our student newspaper, which we did an Aldous Pagemaker, and I would put together these very elaborate vector graphics in whatever the pre, like, predecessor to. No, it was, um, Proto Illustrator. Actually, it was, it was, it wasn't, it was something kind of like illustrator, but it was just for typography. I remember what was called.

I think it was by Macromedia or whatever company. I don't remember the title, but yeah. Aldus, I guess. But, yeah, I would make these very elaborate headers for monthly columns in the newspaper, and they would take about an hour to print out on a laser printer because they had to go through all these complex calculations for the vector art. Yeah, the poster. Yeah, I would do like desktop publishing stuff for assignments in high school on my Mac

and all the other students would be like, oh, come on, man. that's not fair. Those look too good. Yeah, the Mac was so versatile. The Pagemaker was so versatile. There was one time when someone submitted a column, and it was too long to fit. So I just bumped the size down one pixel. My teacher was like, you never do that. Came to me with the printed magazine was like, you don't change the font size.

You edit it down. Yeah, yeah. So it was a learning experience. Yeah. And I think that emphasis, I mean, the Mac, the early Mac had a huge emphasis on desktop publishing and design. That was one of the niches they were gathering. Yeah, that was what they were gunning for, again, with the high resolution and the ability to do all this graphical manipulation and type setting. And I think that actually fed into the early Mac game scene, too, in that you had a lot of people attracted to this platform who were more from the design side of things, who had not necessarily been game developers, who didn't come from that edge, but who came out from a design perspective.

And so you see a lot of early Mac games that are maybe not very gamey, but are more. or almost, you know, there was a search of things that today would get called art games that were more about design. Yeah. Simulating on the Macintosh. Yeah.

You know, there's some things in our list. You could call them like graphical toys, too. There were a lot of that. Like a cat would follow a mouse around or something. It was just a widget. Yeah, a widget thing. Yeah, the NACO. Yeah, I think there's probably a game or two on here

that probably qualify more as like digital toys than video games. But I still remember them and they were still fun. and I enjoy messing around with them. So I guess we should maybe start out by talking about. So I guess we should maybe start out by talking a little bit about the history of the Macintosh itself. I don't know how much you guys really want to get into that, but I think it is important to sort of understand where it came from. You know, Apple hit it big with the Apple II in the late 70s, and that was a massive breakout. It was a massive success. It

really helped sort of commoditize computers. It helped turn computers into something people owned and people used. And so, you know, immediately there were people nipping at Apple's heels, trying to come up with something better or something cheaper, you know, you had just a variety of personal computers. Things like the VIC-20 maybe didn't really stand up so well, but the C-64, that gave the Apple, too, a good run for its money. So, of course, Apple was determined to make the next big thing for themselves. And there were a few different ideas that they had that did not pan out so well. There's reasons you've never heard of them. The first was the Apple three, which seems like the logical next step. What do you guys know about the

Apple 3 is. I'll point this out, which is Apple was always gunning for the upper end of the market, like the home market and the low end of the business market. So they saw the IBM PC as an existential threat. And everyone knew IBM was making a PC, even when they, I think, when they did the Apple 3 in 80. You know, the PC came out in 81. They knew something was coming from IBM, and they knew they needed to make a business machine. So a camel is a horse designed by committee, as they say. So they threw a bunch of. engineers onto a thing that was had nothing to do with and they made a monstrosity it's a giant circuit board didn't do much it had a sophisticated operating system sOS that's literally what it's called yeah that seems like a bad bad starting point let's course it's call sOS which is yeah it's not the save our ship like i'm not a good omen mayday mayday what what kind of what was what did the first s stand for i'm sure it's operating system It was actually sophisticated. Sophisticated operating system.

Yeah. But yeah, maybe... It became Prodos later. That was the roots of Prodos. Interesting. I didn't realize that. Yeah. So that led back into the Apple 2.

Yeah, it did. Huh. Okay. The funny thing is most people, they were like the Apple 3 costs, man, like $5,000 or something ridiculous, which is, you know, inflation, $17,000 today or something. I'm just pulling that out here, but, you know, a lot of calculator. But, yeah, so they, um, But the funny thing is they found that most people were buying them and using them

in the Apple II compatibility mode, which you could put in a disc and booted into Apple II mode. And so they became glorified Apple II's with the built-in disc drive and whatever. So built-in serial port. And it had stuff built in, like, unlike the Apple II at the time. It's kind of like buying a $5,000 3DS and only using it to play DS games. Yeah, pretty much. That'd be funny. $5,000 DS.

The screen, the size of this room. Yeah. Just a really nice oldie. Yeah, glass. Gold. So, yeah, the Apple 3 kind of missed the point. Yeah. It was a total disaster.

Yeah, I've never actually seen one because no one actually had one. Steve Jobs. I have one, but I've seen two in my life. Like, there was one at a school sitting around years later that they didn't know what to do with. And I was like, can I have that? And they're like, no, it belongs to the school system. when I was in high school and they threw it away

you can't own it has to be owned by the trash destroyed yeah the same thing I'm with Elisa I saw Lisa in my library when I was in middle school I was like oh my God that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen

because I was already collecting computers and I got my mom to go to the library to ask them if I could buy it or have it or something and same answer obviously you know they can't sell it belongs to the school system so so this is the next try All right. So, yeah, we should talk about the Lisa also because that was, I think that's the one Steve Jobs wanted to be the next big thing. And the Lisa shares a lot of common heritage with the Macintosh. They were both inspired by all the ideas that Apple stole from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox Park, graphical user interface and so on and so forth. But the Mac would be sort of like the graphical user interface system equivalent of the Apple 2, whereas the

Lisa was more like the Apple 3, very, very expensive, very over-designed, just kind of loaded. Yeah, so I think the common story, if you want to summarize the Lisa development, was that Steve Jobs wanted to do it, and it got assigned to a bunch of engineers. They hired away from Xerox and other places, and they threw tons of money on it, yeah, and it got over-engineered, and they sold it for $10,000. It had these horrible... That's a 1980 money, though. Yeah, 1988 money. three money is when it came out so it had two twiggy drives they call it because there were these weird you know dual density five and a quarter i mean five and a half inch or was it five and a

quarter three and a half i don't remember twigie like the model yeah twigie because they're thin discs i guess i don't know so you could flip them or something no you couldn't flip them it just had two reed heads you know instead of one it looked like a standard five and a four disc but anyway so um just two heads for speed yeah for like whatever better density storage but they they were horrible failures they had high failure rates and so they ended up having to replace it with a three and a half inch Sony drive like they used in the Mac later and that's why the Twiggy Macs are I mean the Twiggy leases are so rare they're incredibly rare because they're a failure yeah most people return them if they bought I mean you spend

$10,000 on a machine, which is like 50,000 or something now. Several times more than your car, probably. Yeah, like your house at the time. You're going to be like, yeah, I want it to be fixed. I want to use it, you know. Interesting. So, yeah. But it was the first

like commercial GUI system under $25,000. There was a Xerox star, which was like $25,000 or something like that. Yeah, that was definitely not meant for home users. Yeah, it was meant for business applications. Yeah, it was. yeah that was like a business yeah big business thing so but yeah leave it was a

breakthroughs are only if you're rich in an early adopter pioneered metaphors of of of window computing and graphical desktop mouse-based stuff and drag drop I like drop down menus and things like that I've written several articles about it if you want to go look them up where would we find those oh boy um search for binge edwards and mac world because I wrote stuff for mac world I was looking at my watch like how my ears it's on my watch yeah it was like from 2007 to like 2013 so it's been it was a long time okay so yeah definitely check those out um but the lisa did not succeed it was a huge failure because of the price because of the unreliability and just because there wasn't a lot of support for it meanwhile

in another part of the apple campus a bunch of plucky young rebels led by jeff raskin uh started developing sort of similar project, but one meant to be more consumer-friendly. That was the Macon. So Steve Jobs got kicked off the Lisa team, I think, or something like that. And then he went and took over Jeff Raskins project. Yeah, I mean, the Macintosh project was in the works for a while.

Yeah. And it was meant to be sort of... An appliance thing. Yeah, but it wasn't it wasn't meant to be, like, it wasn't meant to be the next step of Apple's computing lineup. It was it was a project that they were sort of exploring, but

not with not with sort of the end vision of what it eventually became and um you know they they i think they did start doing the graphical user interface development and that that sort of thing before steve jobs came on but then yeah there were Steve jobs did not make a lot of friends it wasn't mouse based but put it that way that when Steve brought it came in and said let's just make a low cost Lisa you know let's use the techniques we used with me and was in the garage It's just a, you know, a little band of engineers working as hard as we possibly can outside. It's like a skunk works project. Which is kind of what they were doing already.

It's just that now one of the co-founders of the company was heading up the skunk works. Yeah. And that didn't necessarily make the existing team that happy. But it did, you know, it eventually came to fruition. Although a lot of the original vision for the system was compromised because of jobs's, like, weird obsessions with things like it has to be super quiet. So there can't be a fan and there can't be an internal discussion. Get Drive. And startup time was one of his big things.

Yeah. It did have an internal drive real quick. What's that? It did have an internal disk drive. Yeah. Desquette. Disket, yeah. It does.

What does it? The Mac. The first Mac does. 256K? The 128K? Yeah, it does. It has one, a single three and a half inch floppy. So does it not have an internal hard drive?

No, yeah, there's no hard drive. Yeah, the first one did not have an internal. It has a 400K flop. Okay, so yeah, to really get any use out of it, you need to buy an external hard drive or or something. Okay. I knew there was something that was missing. First, you had to flip discs, you know. You could buy an external disk drive, but they didn't offer a hard drive until a little while later,

external hard drive in the Mac. Maybe it was the Mac Plus era. Yeah, I think that was when they started. HD20 or something. Yeah, it originally was a peripheral, but then they started integrating it with... The SE had the first in 87, had the first integrated hard drive option. Okay, yeah, I was hoping I would have time to sit down and read up on this before, like, all of the history, but... I know. That is why I brought me here. There's a great book called Revolution in the Valley that I highly recommend to anyone. I got it, I don't know, like six or seven years ago for Christmas. And it really tells sort of the origin story of the Macintosh before and after Steve Jobs came on and how the project evolved. Like I said, I was hoping I would have time to reread that, but I didn't. So anyway, that's kind of the general gist of everything. Yeah, so it was a closed box. You couldn't add to it from the inside. Yeah.

That was an appliance like nature. Yeah, Jobs really wanted an appliance where you just, easy to buy, easy to plug in, just turn it on, and it goes. Yeah, I mean, you see in the original Macintosh a lot of the things that would continue to be sort of defining traits of systems and projects that Jobs worked on, a closed system, you know, very elegant, very quiet, very self-contained. The Macintosh was a very strange and unique system. The idea of a, you know, the original 128K Mac was an all-in-one unit. It was monitor and CPU and then with an external keyboard. And that wasn't totally unheard of at the time, but it was very tiny. And the monitor was black and white, very high-resolution, like a very high-quality, nine-inch monitor.

It was monochrome, like I said. But because of the high-resolution, it looked different than most monochrome systems. For one thing, it wasn't reversed monochrome. Usually with monochrome systems, you had a black screen with like green or amber on it, you know, for the type. Whereas this, you know, it was the basic background was always a lighter color. They wanted to simulate paper. Yeah, it was the push to get it to take over desktop publishing basically. So you make it look like what you're printing.

Yeah, there was a legacy of Xerox where they did, you know, desktop publishing stuff on the alto with the white background. And that's both, yeah, you need the white background. You need the high resolution. So you can put something on the screen that really looks like what you're going to print out, which was something that nothing else could do at that point. Yeah, and we take that for granted now. That's the metaphor that all computers use. But before the Macintosh, you just didn't see that. It was very strange. Like, it made the Macintosh stand out, not just because of the very cute little box that made the little startup chime and gave you the little

icons and stuff, but also just the way you looked at it. And of course, the way you interacted with it. It was a mouse... Accessible populist computer. It's the first computer that anyone could just pick up and use without knowing anything about it. Because you could, you know... And do things that were more than just... Try the mouse, click, you know. Yeah. Do things that were more than just text. That's why the, you know, the early ad had the hello drawn in script on the screen.

Yes, entirely bit mapped. You know, the display is something different instead of character-based. Yeah, that's also something important. Umberto Echo wrote an essay once a long time ago about how DOS, PC, was Protestant, and the Macintosh was Catholic, because it's built around icons, and everything is sort of sealed away from you. You're not supposed to go probing into the system of the Macintosh. You're supposed to just accept what's given to you

and you kind of go through the processes that are presented to you by Apple. It's a really clever essay. Yeah, that is clear. But it does get down to the difference in how this system worked versus how computers worked at the time. Well, there are exceptions, too. There's some push and pull on this because, you know, you also had people like Wads in here and people like the Hypercar guy.

um what's it i can't remember his name suddenly just left my brain um he's one of the but who were very into to kind of hacking things and letting people build their own stuff and you had them putting stuff on here too that wasn't the underlying philosophy of the system yeah it's not the hardware when you look at the mac you don't have you know like these crazy directories and hierarchies you have the system folder and it's inside the system folder there's things you can't throw away no matter what you want to do you can't delete your system you can try my grandfather God bless a soul. Every time I came to his house, he was like, my system is being weird.

And I'd look, and the entire system folder was in the trash. But you had the trash. That was a metaphor. If you wanted to delete something, you didn't type in a command prompt, you clicked on it, and you drag it to a trash can. Yeah, it was very into making everything into a metaphor that was supposed to be universal. Yeah, system extensions had little icons that looked like jigsaw puzzle pieces that said, like, oh, these are all pieces that are together. Your fonts came in suitcases. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, there was the dog cow. I don't know what that was about. It was there. So, yeah, it was just a different kind of computer system. And, you know, the Mac has evolved a lot over time, and now it's Unix-based. And it doesn't have the cute metaphors and everything that it used to. It's slicker.

It's less personable. And it's actually pretty indistinguishable from Windows at this point. But, you know, back in the day, there was no Windows. It was not something that, you know, Microsoft hadn't entered that market yet. They were working on it, but it's not like anyone wanted to use Windows 1 anyway. Windows didn't get usable until 3. Eventually, everyone decided those were good metaphors, and so everyone used them. Right.

Yeah. So naturally, I think, you know, because of this and because of the mouse-driven interface, the point-and-click concept, the Macintosh naturally inspired a different kind of video game than other computers. And that's what we're going to talk about this episode. Yeah, most Mac games don't have really any music for some reason. I can't think of anything. I mean, the early ones, I'm talking, not like, it had a pretty good sound capability, though.

Yeah, a lot of old Mac games have, like, sample samples. Yeah, like, in Cheddargate. There's, woo, ha, ha, ha, and get locked in. Dark Castle has, like, you can tell it's someone going, like, like, making the sound effects for birds and stuff. But, I mean, there it is. It's right there. It's not just the monocon speaker going,

Burr, yeah. It's actually people, like, making voices. it's samples. It's distinct. Yeah, and some of the ones we have in the list had really great samples. But I mean, back then, computer games didn't have music either. Max were the first to have stereo outputs, too, I think,

other than maybe some kind of like Ork Station or something. Yeah, and high quality, CD quality sound. But that's for the 90s episode. We're going to focus on the 80s. So, yeah, so why don't we just jump into talking about Mac games

from the beginning? And I guess the beginning would be Alice, the 1984 video game. The Mac, of course, launched in 1984. It was why 1984 wasn't like 1984, apparently. Yeah, it was nothing like 19. It wasn't. No, that's 2017. Yeah.

So Alice was actually, have you guys played Alice? I've never played it. I did not have Alice. I've looked up play for us on it. I've just seen a video. I feel like I played it once a long time ago. Andy Herschfeld has a story about it. That's how I know about it on his folklore.org. And it's really impressive for being one of the first things that came out.

Well, it wasn't originally a Mac game. It was a Lisa game. So it was developed for Lisa. And then when that exploded or imploded, it ended up, that game was taken over to Mac. Because the two systems were very similar. Right. So actually, there's a fair amount of content that showed up in 1984 on Macintosh that actually got its start in life on Lisa.

It's kind of like Switching Wii U, if you want to think of it. it that way. Here's a bit of trivia. The Lisa had rectangular pixels, which is really weird. That's right. How old are that? They were wide, I think. Yeah. Yeah, wide. Huh. Yeah, they were not. I did an article about like five of the main differences between the Lisa and the Mac or something that was really neat. Talks about some of the stuff the Lisa did that the Mac didn't do. Like, you could just push a button and it would all shut down automatically and, you know, and restore itself back up when you pushed it back on. Which is what they do now, but it took them a long time to get back in the Mac. signed before that, to, like, Lion or something.

Which is why it cost $50,000. Right. Yeah. But, yeah. But I digress. So, Alice was designed by a guy named Steve Capps, who was part of the, sort of the legendary early Apple team. And it was basically, how did I describe it in the notes?

It's over-the-shoulder action chess, basically. Yeah, it's like chess meets space invaders or galaxy. So you got, yeah. So you play as Alice, you play as Alice, but you get to pick like. Alice as in Alice in Wonderland. I think it's actually called Alice through the looking glass. Right, because in through the looking glass, in the book, there was the whole chessboard thing going on. But so you can pick your difficulty, which is what chess moves, Alice, moves by.

So being a queen is easier and being a pawn and hard. You start the game by clicking on an enemy piece. You control in the foreground just Alice, whereas the computer controls the entire other side of chess pieces. Yeah, the other side has a full chess layout. And each of those move according to their rules. And you start the game by basically clicking on some of the game. thing. If you want to play, like, limitless, you play as the queen who can move, you know, in horizontal, vertical or diagonal directions. As far as you want at a time.

Yeah. Whereas if you choose a pawn, you can move like two spaces and then one space from there on. This sounds a lot like the rules of chess you're describing. Yeah. So the pieces move by the rules of chess. But then you start doing this in real time, which is where it gets crazy. So you're just clicking to move Alice according to whatever rules she has. And meanwhile, enemy chess pieces are just periodically moving towards you. Oh yeah, like nonstop. That's what I saw in the video. And you're trying to take them before they take you, basically.

If anyone has a disc image of that, I want it. Because no one, I don't think it's out there. I don't have it. I don't have it. It's so extremely rare. Yeah. I've never played it or have it. Yeah, I don't have the actual code for it. The video that I found on YouTube of the game, it's not like direct feed. So it's someone like filming a screen. And the title screen doesn't work because of some sort of hardware compatibility.

Maybe it's because of the Lisa Square Pixel thing. I don't know. I think I saw one with the title screen that works. Okay. But, yeah, like, this game was made around at the same time as battle chess, I want to say, an arc-on. No? That can't be possible. I don't know what was battle chess.

Well, I'm a lot of... Battle chess. But battle chess is... On the C-64? Did it originate on the C-64? I thought it was VGA originally... It's not a battle-chess episode. It's not.

But basically, these kinds of... kind of came into being somewhere around the same time. And battle chess is, you know, more like the traditional chess game. Whereas this, you know, takes advantage of the fact that you had a mouse-based control. So there was a lot of precision and a lot of speed possible. And clicking. And it makes, like, it changes the game. It turns it from a turn-based game into a real-time game.

And apparently, like, you can crank up the difficulty level as high as you want, so the enemy gets more moves. and at some point you get to a point where it's just moving so quickly you can't possibly keep up. And in addition to the enemy pieces are trying to move onto the same piece or the same square that you occupy. But in addition to that, the enemies also, the computer is sending

as many pawns as possible up to queen them. Yes. You can end up with multiple queens running around after you, which is ridiculous. So it's like, like I said, I mean, there is this kind of element of like Galaxian or some other shooter to it where, you know, enemies are constantly moving and they're trying to promote themselves and trying to outmatch

you. It's very hyperactive, very quick, yeah. So I did look up, original battle chess was 88. Oh, yeah. That's a way different. That sounds good. Okay. But we're talking 83 on the Lisa versus 88 on the ballot chest. It kept coming out in newer versions up through

like the 90s, but yeah. Oh, okay. Well, I stand corrected then. Yeah. You're going to bring up battle chess every episode, aren't you? Am I? Did we talk about that with Batman? You compared Arkon to battle chess a whole time. Oh, yeah, Batman.

Man and Batman is just like that. They both start with Bat. Bat. Oh, man. Chess. But anyway, about Alice through the looking glass. Like, it's pretty simplistic now. But I can imagine in 1983, 84, looking at that and being like, wow.

Yeah, it's very impressive looking. This is an amazing game. It's monochrome, but it's all beautifully drawn. It has this very exaggerated 3D. Yeah, it's in perspective. Like I said, over the shoulder. It's like a vanishing one-point perspective, very, skewed, but, you know, the pieces grow in size as they move towards you, really just

just a great piece of artistry. It really shows off, I think, the capabilities of the hardware. And I feel like you didn't really see super fast action games that often on Macs. So it's not even like it was a taste of what was to come. It was just this kind of like crazy thing that was, yeah. Because it came from Lisa, it was just, it was kind of its own thing there. So the next game I want to talk about is, well, actually, it's a tetralogy of games. Quadrilogy.

No, you're out of here. Get out. You're banned for retrodust. It punched me. So in 1985, a company called ICOM simulations started developing a series of graphical adventure games, which has been kind of loosely termed the MacVincher series. And these are probably the best known... Some of the coolest games ever made.

Of all of these early Mac games, just among the general, like, console gaming population. Because they ended up on Nintendo. Because three of the four ended up on Nintendo. NES and the fourth one was made for NES but never published and then showed up on GBA or no, sorry, Game Boy Caller. Okay.

There was a Dejavu 1 and 2. So anyway, these, yeah, these were ported to the NES by Kempco Seca, but I think, you know, it's worth talking about the original Mac games because they were, in a lot of respects, different than the games that ended up on Macintosh.

You had Shadowgate, Uninvited, Dejavu, and Dejavu 2, lost in Las Vegas. or lost to New York or whatever it's called. I don't know, Kevin McAllister killed someone or who was in Boston, New York. So did uninvited predate Shadowgate? So I remember Shadowgate coming out first. I thought that was the first time.

I wasn't like trying to put these in chronological order. I just wrote them down as they came to my head. We had Shadowgate, as I mentioned earlier. And it was just incredible because it used the drag and drop windowed metaphor to its fullest. I mean, you pick up items from the scene by clicking on. on them with your mouse and dragging them into a window that's your inventory right beside it. And it's like you were actually picking up objects

and moving them and stuff. Yeah, like fundamentally, these resembled, you know, like a Sierra adventure or something. You had sort of the graphical window and you had the text parser. It's the first person. What's that? It's first person. It is. But I mean, like, sure, but fundamentally, like,

you had the concept of combining maybe like as one of the graphical Zork games. It's an adventure where you're moving through different scenes that you have a big window of, but you also have like inventories and birds and that sort of thing alongside. It mixes two sort of interfaces, but it's a much more seamless interface combination in ICOMs games. Yeah, so it adopts the new Macs metaphors and basically brings them into this genre and runs with them.

So you have picking up things with the mouse and putting them places and all that sort of stuff. It's also, yeah, it's brutal too. Like you can fall down a pit and die easily. There's something in the beginning where you push a candle stick the wrong way and you fall in a pit. yeah shadow gate is full of just like surprise surprise you're dead but the thing is the the text is written so vividly and with kind of a tongue-in-cheek attitude and there's always you know some sort of interesting animation that goes along with it and then the grim reaper shows up like you don't know when i played shadow gate on mac i never on on on nes i never felt like oh this game is so cheap and unfair because like you die but it's not that punishing they make the death a part of the game yeah you go back a screen or two and it's no big deal then you're like oh i I have to do this differently. It's not like, it's not like a Sierra game where you screw up and you're like, oh, guess I got to start the game all over again. Yeah. It never did that.

Yeah, they really made the deaths into being part of the game. Like, you kind of want to see the deaths because they're funny. And so it's not so much a setback. It's like, oh, I saw this funny part of the game. It happens that I'm dead. I have to go again. But whatever. I didn't think they're funny.

I thought they were terrifying. Well, it sounds like six. Depends on the game. Well, you're just a very delicate child. Yeah. Some of them were funny. You know, death is serious when you're six. But they're interesting, is the point.

The death isn't, death isn't just a punishment. It's like you get to see something interesting. Yeah, like, it's the same philosophy behind Timegal, where, like, every death is comical. Or Dragon's Lier, if you want. Yeah, right, right. Actually, Dragon's Lair is probably the better suggestion here because that came before the MacVenture games. But you did sort of see this interface style on PC games in Japan, you know, Ujihori's Portopia serial murder case.

That also used, like, the first-person adventure style. with text parser and like an inventory window. But again, it didn't have the mouse element because it was made for, I don't know, PC88 or something. So this was kind of like pushing that in the next step, you know, to the next level. And, you know, the, again, the quality of the writing. It was very vivid, almost lurid in places.

It wasn't afraid to kind of poke fun at the player. It had that sort of tongue-in-cheek style that Zork did. but then it added the visual element. And I would say that ICOM did visuals, like integrating visuals into the adventure better than Zorke ever did. I don't think Infocom ever really mastered that. They were great at text. Like no one did text like Infocom, but ICOM really managed to come up with good text,

maybe not an infocom quality, but good, and also combined it with really vividly, beautifully drawn black and white scenery. So, you know, the first game, Shadowgate was a journey into a haunted castle ruled by a mad wizard. The second was uninvited where you went, or maybe DejaVu was the second one. Haunted house. But there was a haunted house, yeah, haunted mansion. And then DejaVu was kind of a noir, you know, 1930s detective murder mystery.

Yep. And all of them were great. A lot of just, yeah, like the only one I've ever finished is Shadowgate, but I've definitely played all of them. And there are some differences between the NES and Mac versions necessarily because of NES censorship. A lot of that stuff in the MAC version was, or the NES version was toned down to be less violent or less bloody or less sexual. I felt like Shadowgate was really scary. I mean, there's dragon and coffins and the Grim Reaper. It was, you know, it has a gothic, really scary kind of theme to it.

Yeah, I didn't actually play this one. when it came out. So, you know, that would have been, you know, I would have been only 10 when it came out, but I didn't actually play it then. So I never got the, like, little kid being terrified by this stuff, but I can totally see that happen. Yeah. Well, on the Mac, I think I played through the NES version all the way, and they may have toned it down so much that it feels more playful and stuff, you know. But there are great versions on the Apple 2GS that are in full color. I think of Uninvited and DejaVo. That's right. Yeah. Just like the Mac Dragon Drop, they're really good.

Yeah, and I really think the, the big innovation. here was taking the Macintosh Park, you know, Xerox Park desktop GUI Dragon Drop metaphor and extending it to the video game itself. That was just like a very obvious bridge to make, but no one

had done it before them that I know of. Yeah, it's like the genre already existed, but it really lends itself to the strengths of the system. Yeah, one of the, yeah, a key development in a gooey-based game, you know. Yeah, because you've got the system now that's, you know, it's got this high resolution we keep talking about,

so that plays for the strength of you have this big graphical window showing you where you are that you want to look as good as possible. And then now you've got this, this GUI interface with a mouse that just lends itself to, you know, shuffling your items and all the sorts of things that you already were doing. High-resolution ice clinking. I can fill it with the HD rumble. I think you have three ice cubes in there. There's four if you're wrongs.

You owe me a dream. I fail at one-two switch. I already gave you a drink. But so, yeah, all the metaphors of this new platform lent themselves really well to this genre. And so this just took it and plugged it in, and it works really well. So the next game we're talking about is one by Chris Crawford, who is still kind of a known name in video games. Not Chris Cross.

That was on Sega City. This was Chris Crawford. It was called Balance of Power. Not to be mistaken for Balance of Terror, the classic Star Trek episodes. It's right. I can out nerd you. Chris Crawford will make you. We're not even trying.

All right. So Balance of Power is one of those games that's way out of outside my wheelhouse. It is a strategy simulation game, but it's extremely well regarded. It's considered one of the classics of the genre. In fact, I just recently saw a thread on NeoGaf was talking about microgenres of games, like not full-fledged genres that there are hundreds of entries in, but just kind of like, there's like five or six games like this, and they're all kind of based around one game. Biles of Power is one of the games that created a microgenre. You had a map of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, well, basically the world. And you played as either

the U.S. President or the Soviet Premier. And your goal was to build your country's prestige higher than that of the rival nation without sparking a nuclear war. Yeah, so it's worldwide dual politics. Basically. Cold War edition. And yeah, there's some things that followed in that same vein, but it's a pretty niche thing there. Yeah, I mean, it's much more limited in scope than something like Sudmeyer civilization. It's not meant, it's not about like, you know, follow your civilization through multiple millennia and create the ultimate, you know, the ultimate state of human. It's sort of like political risk, like risk. Yeah. It takes place over eight years and each year is sort of like an extended term where you can act and react and make choices. But you

have to be really careful about your choices because if you provoke the other side into going on the offensive, then the game ends. The idea being that, you know, if everything goes nuclear, no one's going to come out of it alive, so you've lost the game. It's a global conflict game, but it's not, it's, it's an anti-war game instead of being a war game. It's a, it's a diplomacy game where war is the losing condition. The only way to win is not to play. Exactly. If only we could avoid playing. So, yeah, so that was a, that game saw a lot of conversions to other platforms and was widely imitated, but it got a start on Mac. Yeah, then the Mac got its own a roguelike kind of game in the form of the Dungeon of Doom, aka the Dungeon Revealed.

And I kind of like look at this and said, oh yeah, that seems interesting, but I haven't played it. So as someone who loves the game, tell us why it's great. Well, that was the first roguelike I ever played. I mean, this was, you know, I played in 1987 on the SE, and it was distributed as shareware as under the name Dungeon of Doom. and it's like a rogue or net hack with a mouse. So it's a GUI, like probably the first GUI-based mouse-based,

a roguelike where you have a grid and you have these richly illustrated little people. That's also different from the usual roguelike at the time, as opposed to being just ASCII characters. Yeah, ask you characters. Yeah, so. That was an innovation. And you have a, you click around your guy on the grid to move and you click on an enemy to attack it and it goes boom boom like a nice sampled sound

and you pick up double click on weapons to pick them up and you there's a little drop-down menu you can wield the weapons you've got or whatever and cast scrolls or drink spells yeah one of the things i really liked about this game just kind of watching some demos on youtube is that it doesn't try to build all of its menus into the game interface it also uses the system interface of the top. Yeah. The Mac system menu. Like, you want to go to equip armor, then you go to the equipment menu at the top of the screen. Which was super common on old Mac games. I mean, those, the menu, you know, the paradigm at the time before everything was windowed was that you have, the top menu bar is always there. And so you're meant to use

it. And so a lot of old Mac games, you would just create their own entire ecosystem of menus in the top menu bar. Yeah, I didn't play enough of these old games to really have noticed that. A lot of them do that, especially, especially in more complicated. things like, obviously like a roguelike or a role-playing game. But you could even do that like from within HyperCard. Some of my HyperCard games, I took over the menu bar and made to do my own stuff. So when did HyperCard come into being? Was that, that was like 87 or 88, was it? Yeah, 87 sounds about right to me. I should look those. I should look at the history of that. Yeah, before we take our mid-episode

break, then why you tell us, what is HyperCard? Tell us why it's amazing. Okay, so I could easily do a whole mini episode on HyperCard if Jeremy wants to indulge me sometime. But briefly, So HyperCard was sort of a development system that was made within the early Macs system and it was, I got the guy's name now, it was Bill Atkinson was the guy, it was the name of Bill. Yeah, Bill Atkinson. So this was, it was originally devised

as basically a way to let you organize your own information and customize it to do what you need to do. So the reason it's called HyperCard is the paradigm is you have a stack of cards like a file system Or like a Like a Rolodex. Yeah. Index cards like a Rolodex.

So the idea is you could use this to make a Rolodex of addresses or you could use it to make an index of recipes or whatever you have. And so that's what it's really originally set up for. So you can have, I mean, it came with several sample ones that were just set up to do this out of the box. But then you can make your own. So it has, you can position text fields. You can position buttons. Multimedia.

Yeah, you can put in images. Sounds. You can put in sounds. and then you can define something that's the same for an entire stack, so you have a background that's constant, but then you can have different things on each card. Don't forget the hypertext part of it. And there's a scripting language.

That's where it really gets great. Which is key, yeah. So there's a scripting language, and you can add a script to anything. So, like, a field can have its own, a button has its script to do things. A field can have its own script. The entire stack can have handlers,

and it's a very robust entire programming language. And you can click from any one, you know, highlight word to go to another one. like the web. Yeah, you can make it. That's a hypertext. You can do hypertext in it. So you can very easily, very easily make your own Rolodex things that are like searchable and they have special conditions or whatever.

But then if you dig into it, you can do almost anything with it because you can like have a button and put an icon on it and then tell it to move around the screen. And oh, look, now you've got a sprite. I actually wrote a prototype of a platform in HyperCard, which is ridiculous. It's so not designed for that. Yeah, that sounds very unintuitive. It's completely insane. But you can do it. The point is you can do almost anything.

But so it also lends itself very well to adventure games, right? Because you can have different images on different screens, regions of the screen where you click on them and things happen. And you can just, you know, there's this built-in very easy scripting language that you can script it to your heart's content to do what you want. And so that leads into like the Cheyenne stuff, like the manhole and eventually missed, which were all built on HyperCard. Yeah, but best-selling adventure game of all time was built on a jazzed-up HyperCard.

Yeah, so Mist, all this full-color gorgeousness, it's just a hypercard stack underneath, and then it just has people wrote extensions to just let you overlay full-color stuff onto it once Color Mac started being adopted. But if you think about what you do in Mist, all you do is click on reach into the screen and stuff happens. Occasionally you pick something up,

mostly you just go places or you hit buttons, and it makes stuff happen. And so it's just a bunch of connected cards with this gorgeous full-color graphics and occasionally motion videos and stuff laid over them. But yeah, so you could do all kinds of things seeing this. I also, um, one of the things I wrote for my chemistry teacher was this whole like adventure game with like Zelda light controls where you walk around on a grid and run into

things and pick up inventory. Yeah. Hypercard is awesome. Yeah, I tried doing a school project in HyperCard in 1997 and my teacher was like, HyperCard, wow, I didn't think anyone still used that. Oh, I'm just getting started. I don't program. So yeah, that's what I had. We did a little HyperCard tutorial when I was in middle school. They had a Mac lab there or something. They just showed us how to put some buttons on the screen, click on it. It's like, oh, educated now. Yeah, I don't know that any of the games we'll talk about in the second half of this episode were built on HyperCard.

Yeah, well, I mean, Manhole is actually in the 80s, but if we want to leave that to Cheyenne's other stuff. Yeah, we'll say it's stuff for next time. Yeah, because most of them, most of their stuff is 90s. Yeah, the 90s, Mac stuff has a very different character than the 80s. Yeah, I had, yeah, there weren't a lot of big things that came out in HyperCard game-wise because mostly it was utilities. until Cheyenne started doing Manhole and leading Intimist and all that.

There were shareware things that would pop up, but nothing that really hit it big until the manhole, I think. Yeah, I know I name-dropped the site every single time we talk about computers and then some, but I strongly recommend people to check out the Digital Antiquarians piece on HyperCard programs and kind of like the philosophy behind the adventure games that built up around that, and even things like non-linear poetry that people were sort of exploring with these multimedia concepts. It's philfra.net, f-I-L-R-E-D-Net.

Put it in the show notes. Yeah, in the show notes. But, yeah, there's some really great writing there. Like, it's just a great resource, and a lot of research and exposition went into this. So if you really want to know more about HyperCarp, that's a great place to look. Anyway, let's take a break now.

And while we empty our bladders or whatever, you guys could enjoy some advertisements. I'm going to fill my blood, I don't know about you. And call her number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Tollas. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out.

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Folks, I have read a lot of books, something I'm reminded of when I pay my student loan bills every month. And speaking from experience, I know how hard it is to drive the many distractions out of your life to stare at pressed woodpulp for hours on end. Thankfully, we have Audible, the audiobook service with over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or MP3 player. And for all of you listeners of Retronauts, Audible is offering a free audiobook download with a free 30-day trial to give you the opportunity to check out their service.

To take advantage of this offer, just head over to www.audibletrial.com slash game. That's www.audibletrial.com slash game and start your free trial today. And if you're looking for a recommendation to get started, I completely recommend Jim Henson, The Biography by Brian J. Jones.

It's an absolutely exhaustive exploration of the famous puppeteer's life from his early years on local television to his futile attempts to break away from the Muppets throughout the 80s. And did you know that lovable bearded Jim Henson had a dark side? Well, you can listen to nearly 22 hours of Henson Facts by heading to www.audibletrial.com slash game and starting your free trial. This is Norman Lear with my great sidekick. Paul Hipp. Good to be here with you, Norman, on All of the Above. That's the name of my podcast, All of the Above. And it's called All of the Above, because we're going to talk about all of the above.

There isn't anything sequescent. There's nothing too above us or below us. Well, certainly nothing to below us. But we have had guests, you cannot believe, the guests. Julie Louis Dreyfus, amazing. And America Ferrari. Jard Carmichael. Yes.

Oh, Amy Polar. How didn't we overlook? We didn't overlook Amy Poehler. I was saving her for last. And Charles Barclay, I was saving him for first, actually, because I didn't declare up first. I get to hang out with this guy, and this is your chance to hang out with Norman Lear a little bit here and somebody's great guests. God, I wish I was you hanging out with Norman Lear. Son of a gun, that must be excited.

It's the best. I'm telling you. Don't miss all of the above with Norman Lear. Download new episodes every week on the Podcast One app or subscribe at podcast.com. And we're back. I hope you enjoyed the break and bought lots of cool stuff to support us because that's what we're desperately begging you for. Before we get going with the second half of this discussion, I put out a call yesterday for, listener mail about Mac games and got a bunch of responses,

so I'm going to kind of go through the mailbag really quickly and just read a few responses. You got to pause for the male theme song. We don't have a male theme song. I'll make you want to say now. It's males and females. It's okay. All genders are allowed to send us letters. What's that?

They sent us a pistols. Pistols and stamens. Stamins. We're going to read them to you now Read them to you now Yes Okay, so from Ryan Nims Because I was pretty young in the early to mid-80s

My only memorable experience from the time Was Oregon Trail Which of course has already been covered on Retronauts That was more of an Apple 2 game Yeah I mean, I got the Mac port It was a teletype game, damn it The thing is is, you know, Macs were in so many

school labs after the Apple I mean, after the Apple, too, because Apple kept up its educational footprint. So everyone had Oregon Trail, because it's educational. Yeah. However, about five years ago, I did manage to play a bit of Castle Wolfenstein by an emulation. I didn't put that on the list. Of course, the visuals and sound are extremely crude by today's standards, but Silas Warner's The Voice Program was so far ahead of its time of those robotic German voices still sound great.

The stealth is uncompromising, and thus the game is not easy. But it's great to see the origin of one of my favorite game franchises of all time. But that didn't originate on the Mac? Yeah, I think of that more as a... It was a part. I have the discs for it in the box there. Oh, wow. Let's stick them in and see what happens.

Do you have a slot on that MacBook Air there for the... Yeah, put the floppy in my Mac air. If you fold it, it'll fit in it. Yeah, totally. You can get a twigie disc in there. Twigie. From Curtis Zinger, I work in a law firm that recently gave away a Mac classic from the early 90s after using it in a patent prosecution case.

I'm the lucky guy who received it. It's in stellar condition, and after bringing it home, the monochrome image is a short of... sharp and beautiful as I imagined it would be. Problem is, only Tetris exists on its hard drive. It's the great game, but it's the only one I have. They're in line my questions for you and your guests.

Can I play any of the games you mentioned, will mention on this episode on this Mac Classic? And two, where is the best place to pick up some floppy disk versions of these classic games? Yes. I mean, they should play, but how do you get all of them? So, yeah, you can play... Yeah, you should be able play all this stuff. The Mac Classic should be able to play

anything, like System 7 and before. Everything we're mentioning in this episode, yeah. Anything Black and White can play on the Mac. Yeah, as long as it's black and white. So, yeah, you can get them either by piracy. I mean, you can download, you know, disc images and use disc copy. If you can get that on your, like, get a copy of it through eBay or a friend or something. And then you can.

We're allowed to say that on here. When it comes to easy games, it's, the media is so fragile. Right. I really don't have a problem saying, like, just find a copy of it on the internet. If you want to track down on eBay and get the original discets and cross your fingers and hope to God that they still work, more power to you. And then when they don't work, download it from the internet. At this point, we're at a lot of people who made these old games. These are like crumbly papyrus.

Think of it like crumbly papyrus. Like, are you going to make somebody go buy a copy of, you know, the Dead Sea Scrolls to read them? And several of these, several of these actually are, in fact, GPL now. I came across that when looking up some of these games that they've actually been released into the public domain now. So you can actually perfectly legally download them from the internet and stick them on your buy it. There's a site called the Something Garden. Oh, MacGarden. The MacGarden is that?

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff. So, I mean, I guess ask yourself, like, what do I believe is right and just? And find your games that way. Or just do it. Also, there's a Mac floppy emulator device that I have. It's called Floppy Emu that you can use like a,

floppy drive. It plugs into the floppy port. I think it's a 15-pin port or something or 18-pin on the back of every classic Mac. And it acts like a floppy drive. And so you put something on an SD card, the disc images, and you can boot them from there. So that's probably the best thing. That's cool. For the Famicom Disc System. It's a great idea. Nice. All right. So here's one from Crary Myers. He actually wrote a lot. I'm just going to jump to the Dungeon of Doom part. Could we just talked about that. Dungeon of Doom had a lasting effect on me in as much as I am still an avid roguelike player. It had an even greater effect on me than rogue, which I played first. For those who don't know, the game is a fairly simple graphical

dungeon, rogue-like. Explore random dungeons, find items, identify them, kill monsters, repeat. But it had actual graphics in all their monochrome glory, unlike Rogue's Asky interface. I played and enjoyed Rogue, but for some reason the graphics made all the difference. And one other thing, there were wish scrolls. This blew my young mind. In practice, they were most useful for getting you some item, like a weapon or potion. But because you got to type in what you wanted. I was sure that someday I'd find something super cool I hadn't thought of. I'm not quite sure what I wanted, a laser gun, a peppy holder, but it seemed like maybe I could get it. Nice. That was cool. I remember the wish scrolls now that you mention it. Yeah, that's cool. I had those.

Dungeon of Doom is awesome. And that was like something I was going to say when we were talking about it before. I don't know the answer to this, but I was kind of wondering if any Japanese people were into Dungeons of Doom who later led to the mystery dungeon genre. Because now we have all these things coming out of Japan, they're basically easier rogolikes, but they're very graphically presented. I'm trying to set up some interviews at Spike Chunsoft, so maybe I can ask them. I've interviewed them. Just because looking at

Dungeoning wasn't one I play, but looking at the videos of it, you know, it has that look to it. It's on this checkerboard grid. It kind of like, you know, almost looks like a game board, and I feel like I've seen this ry Dungeons that have that look. I mean, you know, Dragon Quest and

a lot of those games were inspired by wizardries. Yeah, I mean, certainly there were a lot of people over there playing. Big in Japan, that's the question, and that's an answer I do not know. I mean, it's very popular among collectors in Japan now because I looked at a lot of collectors sites. I feel like there was a period in the middle where there were a lot of Macs where it existed. I mean, they like to soup up color classics to make them crazy. It was a different kind of computer than you could otherwise buy in Japan.

Yeah, I don't think the really early Macs, like, took over from the, the Black and White era. The PCs, yeah, the PCs that were really big in Japan, you know, 98 and whatever. I don't think, I don't think it really ate their market. I think later on when people were doing graphical stuff and desktop publishing and stuff, Matt got a lot of inroads then, but I don't know if it was a high-resolution thing would have made it good for the Japanese character sets, probably.

Right? The screen. I think so, yeah. I don't know the answer to that. So a letter from Reagan Kelly, I'm not entirely sure how Mac games got into our house in that pre-internet era, but there were always one or two games on discs

scattered around my dad's home office. They're called GameStores. I vividly remember being astonished by the sound effects in Crystal Quest. Now I can't imagine how I played the game without muting it. Another big time sync was Glider. The levels were all rooms in a house, and they were really well illustrated. This one still gets ports from time to time, most recently an NES port by Retro USB.

I remember trying to figure out the story of the family that must live in the Glider House. There are lots of little details that hint at lives being lived, but not enough to make many connections. I think the Spider games from Tiger style took this concept and ran with it to incredible results. I think that's neat. Just a tangent for a second that a child's mind imagines all kinds of things that aren't obviously there in the game.

When I played Deadlight Towers on the NES, there are all these windows and these buildings behind. And I always imagine what was in those windows and who lived there and stuff. But I would never think of that today. Yeah, actually, I added Glider

to our list for later on, so we'll get to that. Yeah, glider was a great thing. Yeah, glider was neat. It's tricky, but it's cool. One from Krista Set. I'm glad you're tackling black and white Mac gaming this week. For most of my childhood, I had only an NES and a Mac, so these games were very important to me.

Dark Castle, along with its sequel Beyond Dark Castle, hasn't aged well from a gameplay perspective. The difficulty is based far too much on memorizing long sequences of time jumps, using incredibly stiff and awkward controls. But aesthetically, Dark Castle captured the best aspects of early Mac gaming. The backgrounds still look great and demonstrate how a skilled artist can create beautiful atmospheric environments with only black and white pixels. These were some of the first games that emphasized that I played that emphasized free-form exploration, allowing the player to wander the castle's different areas in any order, and even skip collecting crucial upgrades for a faster challenge. Falling into Pints doesn't kill you, but instead drops you into a dungeon level,

which adds to the sensation that the castle is a real space. And the games are really funny. The digitized sound samples make the Haple's Prince a legit cartoon character, gibbering when he walks into walls, yelping when he falls off a ledge, and grunting as he climbs a staircase. Taking the wrong key off a wall kills you instantly, but I would do it deliberately to see a 16-ton Looney Tunes weight drop on the Prince's head. I would definitely recommend retronauts listeners check out Darkcastle via Archive.org's new system6 browser emulator at Archive.

Details slash Jason Scott. Actually, I'll put this in the notes. Just Google it. Jason Scott.com. But thank you, Letter, writer. You just covered our next bullet point because that was it. But yeah. Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit more.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Dark Castle was great. A couple more. Whoa, there's a really lengthy one. Okay, from a guy named Atari Spot. His parents were pretty crazy. Who's one? Well, I mean, my parents didn't name me Atari Spot. He sent me 10 early Mac gaming memories. I'm going to read two of them for games that we did not include in our notes.

Actually, his top two here, Peri Renna by Soft Dorothy Software. Wow. Another great game eventually published by C. It was incredibly hard to play with a mouse, but the day we came home with a new Gravis mouse stick made this an instant classic. The sound effects and graphics, even in black and white, were fantastic, and I mean, riding a hoverboard while dunking on your opponent and checking them out of bounds. Who could ask for more? Challenging and fun. I've never heard of this game.

You know, it's number one game is in 1992. So let's look at his number three game, which is Falcon by Spectrum Hollowline. I've heard of that. I could not believe that a full-featured combat flight simulator was working on my Macintosh. Gosh, there it was. I was making bombing runs and dogfighting so often. I remember naively telling classmates that, yes, I could fly an F-16. I mean, if I had to, probably.

Nice. It's a cool game. I didn't have that one, but I've seen it. I think it originated on the PC, maybe. Falcon 3.0 or something. Probably. It had so many ports, so who knows what the first place. So here's a letter from Norm.

That's all caps. He talks about having a Mac Plus. wants and feels like there weren't enough games on it. He says, do you guys maybe know why the Mac Plus was completely overlooked during that time? Was it because of its awesome color display, which consisted of black, white, gray, and even deeper black? It's odd

because the Mac was honestly much more fit for gaming since it was sleek responsive. It didn't require as much input as the average PC. Just double-click and you're good. Why was Mac gaming more of a niche? I have a answer, which is that it had an innovative interface. It had the

Wii U problem at first, which is that You know, if you have a whole generation of game developers trained to use a joystick or keyboard or something, you give them this new thing, it's much easier to port their games that they already know how to do than to develop new ideas that use this novel interface. And the Mac was like the touch interface of the day. It was very novel. It took several years to really ramp up for people to get used to using this platform. Like with any completely new platform, I can say. Let's see, a letter from Tyler Burton. my dad encouraged me to learn about HyperCard,

the foundational software behind these games, uh, Sian's games and others. And I gave a shot at creating my own linked rooms and experiences. Recently I found out that my parents still had that very same MacSE for my youth.

So I took it home and found out that it still booted up and ran just like it was 1888. And to my surprise, I found a pathetic hypercard stack that I made when I was probably six or seven. And, uh, I'll share you guys. It's a crudely drawn cheek of cheese and a button that says, cheese is good.

Awesome. And he ends the letter by saying, today I run a cheese shop. Apparently, I just knew. I don't think we can top that. I told you hypercarp is great. It changes lives. Yeah.

Well, it's obvious that something I've always said about computers and games and why they're important to preserve is that they're very deep cultural experiences that are important, you know, part of the recipe of what makes you who you are. experiences as you grow up. So it's important to celebrate these things. And that's what we're

doing. It's probably not an exaggeration to say HEPercard is why I have a master's in computer science now. Yeah, there you go. I can't account for my graphics design major, so I don't know. Oh, well, sure. Macintosh. I remember drawing pictures of a bottle of whiteout on a Macintosh just because I was like, hey, I don't need to erase stuff on a Macintosh. I don't need whiteout. So let's go back to talking about some of the games. Next up is Dark Castle, which was mentioned in brief by one of our letters. But I think it deserves more discussion because it really,

really was a sort of landmark game for the Mac and really commands a lot of, I don't know, I feel like it's a game with a lot of love behind it. Like, people really remember it fondly. I missed out on it. This is the first one. Until I did research for this episode, like, I didn't have a distinction in my head between Castle Wolfenstein and Dark Castle. But now I see that they're very, very different games.

Yeah, so this is the first one I list that I actually owned it at the time it came out, or at least near by, and I still own it. Yeah, I actually wrote this game up for a, for a game. Spite issue, like half a decade ago or something. And see, I edited it, and I probably was thinking Wolfenstein. Yeah, that was not it at all. Castle. But, yeah, I mean, it's a very ambitious, uh, 2D platformer with, you know, as our

recurring theme here, gorgeous black and white graphics. Um, so it had these big, well-animated sprites and these incredibly gorgeous backgrounds. Um, one screen at a time, but as the letter, as our letter writer said, you could kind of choose where in this castle you went to, so you could go to different, there were several different regions of the castle. And actually within each region, it kind of randomized the room. So you'd have a slightly different experience each time. I mean, just, just kind of as an outsider perspective on this game, it seems to draw a lot of influence from, honestly, from Donkey Kong. Like, I look and the platform elements, I mean, there's one screen where there's

like an executioner guy throwing rocks that view that tumbles. There is a very Donkey Kongish screen. Then you go to the next screen and you're climbing vines and there's like birds that swooped down at you. I mean, very donkey con junior. There's some docu kongish stuff. There's even some like galaxian-ish stuff with a swooping birds. It draws from a lot of things. But another fundamental similarity, I think, is the idea of each screen being a self-contained challenge that you need to complete.

And it even kind of plays around with space a little bit because there are some screens where instead of it just being like, you know, the screen is one square area. It's basically like an extended area. and you scroll to the end of the top half of the screen, and you show up on the bottom half. It's like they've taken something that's two screens wide and half a screen tall and just stacked it on top of the other. Yeah, there's an interesting like architecture.

But it does really get to that sort of classic adventure game, action game style concept. You'd see a lot in Prince of Persia or the Odd World games even where it's not so much, you know, like you're on a grand exploratory adventure, but more like you're solving this box of puzzles one by one. Each screen is very much its own thing to master. And most screens have like some new, either some new enemy or some new mechanic

that you have to use to go through. And lots of ways to die until you figure out how you're supposed to deal with that screen. And it's a very, it's a very slow and deliberate platform. So you're not just like running around. You actually, you can throw rocks, but it's not like Mario where you're just running around. The crazy thing about the game is that it combines both,

keyboard controls and mouse controls. Right. So your character movement is controlled, keyboard, left, right, and jump, and up, down, ladders, and that stuff. But your attack is aimed by the mouse, right? Yeah, aimed, you mouse aim, so you can move your arm arc, and you can, so this is another thing taking advantage of sort of the high resolution of this system. I'm confused by the popularity of this game, other than the fact that it's like you had to be there, kind of like the Dungeon of Doom, where the Dungeon of Doom was the best you had.

And I think of, like, Captain Comic on the IBM PC, which was, like, an incredible shareware, Mario-like platformer. And it was just so awesome on the PC. But if you put it next to Mario or something, it just sucks. I mean, you know. Yeah, I mean, actually, like, I look at this game, and this game is contemporary with Super Mario Bros. Yeah. And I said this one I wrote up against. And, like, this game doesn't stack up too badly to Super Mario Brothers.

It's a different kind of experience. It's very, very different. Yeah. But, like, you know, visually and just in terms of all the things you were doing, It really, to me, this game feels a lot like some of the the sort of action adventure platformers you saw on Famicom in Japan, like Atlantis No Nazo or Challenger or something, where they were trying to create a bigger adventure.

But this is much, much better put together. It also reminds me a lot of, you know, some of those spectrum games you saw, like the Jetset Willie type things. And this looks much better than those games. And seems to me like it's probably a lot less frustrating. challenging, but not as like... It's still pretty frustrating, honestly. It's very frustrating.

But it is a unique experience. I'm not saying it's a Super Mario Brothers rip-off or anything like that. It's a very different thing. You just loved it if you had that on your Mac and that was your only game. I mean, people bought like one game a year or something back then, you know. But yeah, it's... You played it and you loved it. Visually and conceptually, it's very impressive.

Like, the actual game control, I would not necessarily try to defend to someone who wasn't there at the time. It's very slow, it's very touchy. You really have to want to like it in order to deal with how his character moves. By the thing, that concept, that sort of like, the weird sort of aiming approach, like you would see that in other games, to a degree, like in Turrican,

I feel like treasure games, kind of, like Gunstar Heroes and stuff, try to explore that within the context of a console game. And then, of course, you had a fuse developed by crack.com and published by Bungee in the late 90s. That was literally the same thing. Like it was a Turrican-style shooter where you

could aim independently with the mouse as you ran around to the keyboard. Yeah. I think about this, like compared to like console games, like because you had this high resolution screen and this very precise mouse input, they made it so you can, you know, you can aim in very small increments. Which is cool. But it also

makes it very easy to like just miss things. You're not, you know, you're not just going up, down and diagonally. You're going in all these different possible directions. And so you're shooting at some bat halfway across the screen. You can throw 10 rocks and with every one of them. And that can get frustrating. I mean, the game was very generous with its supply of rocks. So you kind of about rocks. There's a lot of rocks in the game. Throwing rocks. Yeah. But it's neat. Yeah. It's a cool game. It has a, you know, it's culturally important.

It was great for its time. And it obviously has a lot of endearing qualities like the animations and sounds that were unique and special. But, yeah, I would not claim to anyone that it's not hard to get into. Getting the hang of the controls takes some investment. And even then, it's not an easy game. Like, you have to figure out each screen. And even when you did, the execution is not always easy. Yeah, but I mean, that's probably true for most games of this era, especially the ambitious ones.

I wouldn't recommend that someone who's never played an NES game jump into the original Zelda or Metroid because they're going to be like, wow, I want to stab my eyeball. And it was an era when you weren't downloading a new game every week. You know, you spent money on this game. And there's like, there's 14 screens in this game. They're all gorgeous. But if you just ran through them, it would be over in, you know, two minutes. So imagine the 80s you're trapped in a room with one computer, with one game for like six months.

And you have to play that. You can't talk to anybody about it other than through writing mail. Yeah, you send a letter to the editor. But yeah, it's a different era. You would actually practice the individual screens of this to figure them out and figure out, and figure out how you wanted to deal with them. And in that context, it's not so bad. If you pick it up now and try to run through it,

you're going to have a bad time. So at the opposite end of this, I'd like to talk about Stunt Copter, a game that almost barely qualifies as a game. But I still have fun memories of it because it's just so goofy. Like, this was on one of my computers at the computer lab when I was a kid, and everyone wanted to play it because it's super accessible and a little bit macabre. But you're just, like, you have a helicopter, and there's a cart of hay being pulled across the bottom of the screen. And there's a little guy hanging from the helicopter. and you choose where you fly to and then you drop the guy and he goes

kicking and flailing as he drops and you try to land on the hay it's like Assassin's Creed the prequel and if you miss then oh God you miss So we should talk about we should talk about shareware in general for a second because that's not so much of a thing right now

so maybe not all our listeners are familiar I think of shareware is more of a 90s thing but I guess it was 80s too yeah I mean this I mean stunt copter was 86 and it was very much shareware so shareware was basically the the 80s and 90s version of here you can just have this but please support my Patreon kind of deal really back when the internet was a much much less of a thing so you could get these I mean if you had internet in the 90s you could download them but you could also send off for discs that just had shareware on you're talking about BBSs or you could get them off BBSs you could get them off dial yeah you could get them off dial on BBSs sometimes but basically these were so these would be able to be able to. Most of the big, small games produced by, you know, indie developers, although we didn't even really have that term then, but just dudes writing them. Yeah, it was like a person making a video game and not working at a major publisher.

So they would mostly just be these little things. And it would be like, here's the full game. You can play it. If you like it, please literally send me in the mail, you know, five bucks or something. And that was how they work. And, of course, most people wouldn't, but some people wouldn't. So, you know, some people would make a little bit of money off this. We should do a whole episode on shareware stuff because I've done a lot of writing about the history.

I'm sure. I'm sure. that would be a festival. But this was definitely a big thing on Max in the late 80s and early 90s. And so this stunt copter, you know, it's a very simple little thing. All it is is one mechanic

and you just try to do it and get a high score. And so, yeah, it was a little shareware thing. Yeah, it's like, I mean, it's kind of a precursor to Angry Birds almost. You're just doing one thing over and over again. Yeah. But even more limited because it's just one copter and one hay cart.

Yeah, yeah. And actually, that's also a big game. It's very much, very much that era version of the free to play, except we didn't have, because they weren't internet enabled, you couldn't have micro-transactions. So it was just, you know, pretty please pay me something was how it worked. Yeah, people don't even know what micro-transactions are anymore. That's something from like 2002.

Well, so in-act... Everything is a micro-transaction. Yeah, everything is now. Yeah, but they don't know that term anymore. You did not have in-app purchases because you probably weren't even connected to the internet. And even if you were, these shareware games, certainly didn't have net code. so yeah it was just here's my cool thing if you like it send me some money and some people did

so maybe a little tangentially related to that is the next game Shanghai not that Shanghai itself was shareware but it did inspire a lot of like freeware and shareware clothes definitely and Shanghai if people out there have been following Game Boy Works and the other sort of Game Boy retrospectives I've been doing then you've seen Shanghai because it was a staple of Game Boy,

not only this game, but also the mini clones. For some reason, it, well, for whatever reason, it kind of, like, created this weird microgenre of other games with a similar concept, also named after a Chinese territory. So far, in Game Boy Works, I've covered

Shanghai, and also Hong Kong, and also Shishen Show, which is Japanese for Cessuan. So, so, like, all of these games are about, about, and I haven't been to Taiwan, I haven't gotten there yet, but probably there's one up in the future.

I don't know. But all these games are about matching Mahjong tiles. And Shanghai was the original. It came out for Mac and Amiga in 1986. It was designed by a guy named Brody Lockard, who I've read was a gymnast who became crippled in an accident. I think he became paraplegic. And so he became more focused on developing video games.

And he worked on this, and also a game we'll talk about briefly later, Ishido. Yeah, I read that it started on the Plato system, that educational network game system in the early 80s. That's what I read about Shanghai originally. But somehow he came back and did it for Activision. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it became like an actually published game. And it's like the American version of Mahjong, which means to say it has nothing to do with Mahjong, but it uses Mahjong tiles. And you just have a stack of tiles and you can only move pieces that are not blocked, either.

on the sides or above. It's like a mountain of tiles, so you have to dig through the edges. But you're trying to, basically there are like, I think, four tiles, maybe it's eight tiles, I can't remember, that share the same symbol on them. It's like, you know,

Chinese symbols for one through nine and then like the seasons and there's an illustration. Basically, this is to Mahjong as solitaries to poker. Basically, yeah. You're using that. deck, but you're just playing a matching game. It's really easy to cruise along until you get to the very end, and it's very easy to accidentally sort of rock yourself into a way where you can't actually make a match

and you lose the game. Similar to if you're playing solitaire, like, Klondike. That reminds me, yeah, since I grew up with this Shanghai game, I was like, then they called it Mahjong. I was like, yeah, I know Mahjong. So I played like Mahjong for the Famicom. It's like, what the heck is this? No, no, no.

So I had, so I didn't actually have Shanghai. I actually had one of the share of our knockoffs. Gunshy. I have no idea why it was called Gunshy. Shanghai, Gunshy. It's just like mixing up the, yeah. Offensive, stereotypical. Yeah.

Yeah, and it had like terrible icons. But, but this leads into one of the other things I wanted to mention, which was the ability of to edit Mac games. So, like, one of the, you know, one of the things about Mac is how it's this, like, lockdown perfect system. But there were also a lot of, like, hack. or type people working on Mac like Woz and so on. And so one of the things that came with Macs was this little utility called ResEdit,

which stands for Resource Editor. Right. It's important to mention that Mac files had this format where there was like the data fork and the resource fork, right? And the resource was stuff like icons and images. And I hate resource forks. And so all the, yeah, so it causes tons of problems if you want to move all Mac stuff to a different file system because the file system was actually oriented around all your

executables having these two forks. It's like about Silver. awareness. It's a cutlery system. But this was the standard for Mac for all through its early, I mean, up until like OSX, right? Yeah. Yeah, up until OSX.

And OS10 still has some weird crap going on. Yeah, but it doesn't have the resource work. But you can still, it's like embedded. So every standard program, every program that was put together in the standard way had this. Yeah. Yeah. Now you just have packages. And it's more uniform across different platforms.

But this was a Mac only thing at the time. And every standard program had all its graphics and notes and stuff in this resource fork. So Res Edit was a program that actually, I think, was just came with the system, or if not, you can install it off the utility disk. Yeah, I think it was on the utilities disk. I don't think it was meant to be, like, for mere mortals. Yeah, I know, but actually took the time to dig around. But it was there. You could get it.

So this was, I mean, this was sort of how the Mac worked. It was, you know, the out-of-the-box system was just, you didn't need to touch it. It was just supposed to work. But if you wanted, there were people, you know, making these things that were hackers and they knew you would want stuff, and they put it there. So you could get this Resed it off the utility disk and just open the resource. fork of any program. So something like Gunshy, which is just has all these

icons for tiles, you go in with Res Edit and there are all your icons. You can just replace them. So suddenly you have a version that you can make a version of Shanghai with whatever stupid tiles you want. And oh Lord, I always played it with Simpsons. I made, yeah, Simpsons was a big. So people sometimes people would do this and then redistribute it as their own thing version. So the

Simpsons Version was very big. It just had basically little, you know, 16 bit or sorry, 16 pixel icons of Simpsons characters as all the time. But you could go in and make your own, and I made some really stupid versions of Gunshy. You can, you know, if you're not familiar with those, the Chinese

characters and the, the set of titles, it's so much easier sort of to play. And you could do this with a lot of games. I mean, the more complicated games, sometimes it would you know, it wouldn't be so straightforward because if you had got to something that had weird textures or whatever, but something that just was based on icons. You know, I had

later on, I had a version of Poyo Poyo for Mac, that, you know, people know Pollo, it's just like little blobs, and I replaced the blobs with so many different things. Did you replace them with Kirby or Sonic characters? I don't think I heard of your head. I did, like, weird versions. Oh, the Nintendo did. That's true. Jelly beans?

Or, yeah, the Jelly Bean version or the Yoshi version or cookies or Dr. Botanick's. Yeah, me and the machine was straight up. Yeah, yeah, people did this for real. No, I had a version where one of the colors of Pollo was invisible. that was evil. That sounds not very nice. It wasn't very nice at all. I, like, sprung this on my college roommates. It was great. It was totally playable if you know what you were doing. Anyways, I digress. But, but yeah, so there were a lot of versions of Shanghai,

particularly because it was so easy to make new versions. All right, we're kind of running low on time, so we're going to blitz through a few more notable titles. One of them I'd like to talk about, but I don't really feel like I'm qualified, is The Fool's Errand, which is an adventure game by Cliff Johnson and I have read through the years many people talking about how amazing

this game was but I've never played it myself so it's really hard to say is this something you've played Ben? I have not actually played over it I didn't have it when it came out I've looked at it later I think this is sort of obscure because I've heard many great things about it. People who play it really like it. I think it's a cult game. I don't have

a copy of it you know I've bought people's Mac just collections and stuff and never was there a copy of the Fool's Aaron in there Like, it's essentially, it's essentially, like, it's a set of puzzles, but it's also kind of a visual novel. Like, it has this story running through. It's a story of like a fool who is on a quest. Yeah. Trying to get some bread from the store.

Yeah. So there's this, there's this very, I mean, and this was another, so like I was talking about before, the Macintosh attracted people who were not traditional game designer. So this was one of those things. Oh, yeah. Where, like, the person who made it was not at all a game person. Clif Johnson. Yeah, it's, yeah, another Cliff Johnson one.

But they were bringing to this, they were bringing to this, basically, you know, graphics and literature and making that into a game by putting some puzzles in it, essentially. So you have this whole story, but to unlock the story, you have to do these puzzles. You know, and in a way, it's almost like Professor Layton these days, where you have basically just a story, but then there's puzzles you do to get through it. Although in this one, the puzzles are arguably a lot better integrated than Professor Layton. It's not just like, oh, this reminds me of a puzzle, but rather you have to do this to get from this area to this area. And then, or like, the answer to the puzzle reveals something about the next chapter of the story. I remember this. It is late-in-esque in that if you get stuck on something that's not, you know, like you haven't hit a wall for the game. You can duck out of that puzzle.

Go a different way. Yeah. And, like, there are all kinds of things. There's, like, jigsaw puzzles and rebuses and word puzzles and just, there's a huge variety of things. I remember something about the fools there. And back in 2007, there's something called the game canon being developed by the IGDA and stuff. and I was asked to participate in that. And Steve Moretsky, I think, you know, one of the Infocom guys who worked on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

among other games. Yeah. And he listed The Fool's errand as one of his favorite PC games of all time. That makes sense. So that's a pretty heady, you know, pretty good endorsement, I think, from a legendary adventure designer. No, it's very highly regarded. And this is another one.

There's a great article on the Digital Antiquarium that people should check out. That really goes into the history of it, and I think the guy who runs the site, Jimmy Mayer, actually interviewed Cliff Johnson about the game. So there's a lot of insights into kind of his life, you know, beyond just the game. So it's a great read. I recommend everyone check it out. I'll put it in the show notes. Okay. So can I?

I know. Okay. Ben, just really determined to talk about Crystal Quest. I kind of want to struggle with it. All right. Right, guys. Go for us something special. Crystal Best was great.

It's almost like a. So that's with Bentley the Bear, right? No. No. You have this little crystal flying around. It's almost a proto twin stick. It's the crystal mansion. I think of it.

It was Bentley. So I kind of think of this as a proto twin stick shooter, except it's only one stick. Yeah. Like, does that make sense? Yeah, I get it. Yeah. So you have this little crystal spaceship, this little spaceship, and you're flying it around this little square. So, and like, I'm shooting at things.

And it has momentum and it's all lumpy and stuff. That's the thing that's weird. So your mouse... It's like Space War with a mouse. Right. You entirely use your mouse, but your mouse position does not correspond one-to-one to the ship. You're not just putting the ship somewhere. You're using the mouse to impart momentum.

Yeah. It's really like Space War with the mouse. Yeah, it is Space War with the mouse. It's not quite because you can... I mean, you stop and it stops eventually. It just slows it down. Yeah, it has to... There's drag.

It's not like it'll just keep going forever. You really kind of have to play it to get a feel for the physics of it. But it's a really unique thing. and it had like it had like interesting so you gather crystals and you shoot things at the same time yeah you're trying to basically you don't actually have to clear out the enemies because what you're really trying to do is pick up all the crystals

and then escape yeah without you end up being shipped with you do it so you're avoiding things your little ship with avoiding the enemies shooting them from different directions based on where you point your mouse while you click the button yeah you're always shoot in the direction you're moving

which is why it's the single single and then don't you have to like navigate through a tiny little exit at the end? You have to get through a little exit portal When you do that, it gives you this weird orgasm noise, I noticed. It's like, what's going on there? That's because sex is exactly like this game. Realistel Quest, yeah. He's pointing in the wrong direction.

Did that sure work on this game? I don't think so. But it's just, it's a lot of momentum involved. And drag. And another interesting thing about this game is. Right, guys? Anyway. Okay.

But no, but the other interesting thing is one of the later versions of it came with its own enemy editor. You didn't even have to use Rez edit. You didn't even have to use Res Edit. So you could construct your own enemies and their behaviors and stuff. So that was another cool thing about it. I was probably in the color era.

The color version of version. It didn't get ported to color. Yeah, the original was black and light, but it definitely got updated to color. And a Game Boy color port, which is weird as heck. I put a scan of that on vintage. Yeah, it was apparently ported to Game Boy.

I didn't actually know that before I looked it up. Bentley gets around. If you look it up, you'll probably get vintage computing retro scan of the weak Crystal Quest on Gayboy. I'll do it. Speaking of color, we should talk about Solarian 2. The very first Mac game made exclusively four-color systems.

This one I had. Which didn't show up until 1988. That's how long it took for Max to finally say, yeah, okay, color. Yeah, it's like some of the, it's like one of those overlapping platforms situation, where the color Mac came out, but a lot of people still had black and white Macs. So if you put out something, you want a lot of people to play. People were using the SE30 until 1995. Yeah, yeah.

And that was a black and white on for a long time. But so it took a little while for people to even be willing to put out stuff that was only color exclusive. It was a higher resolution. And it was a higher resolution. Some games still were like color but a smaller window. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

If you had something that really took advantage to the whole Mac too, then it absolutely couldn't play on any of the other ones. So that was a problem. And so a lot of games had, you know, their original black and white version and their color port. Yeah, I remember Salarian. It was a shooter, right? Yeah. It was very galaxian-ish, but the patterns were weird. The patterns were fantastic.

And I mainly remember it because I played it and I was like, oh, I recognize that sound effect. Oh, and I know where they took that one from. It's like, oh, it's not the orgasm sound effect. It's the cash register from Pink Floyd's Money. And then there's, ah, ah, ah, from not one of us from Peter Gabriel. Yeah, there was all kinds of stuff in there. But so this had like, you know, amazing graphics for the time these cool.

I mean, they're actually not that great if you go back and look to them. But just having everything in all color at the time was cool. Yeah. It was another one of those games that was very Macintosh-ish because of its extremely high resolution. Like, the sprites were very tiny. So this was formatted exactly for the Mac, too. It took up the whole screen, which gave you a ton of space for something that was basically like a space. But it was like taking, you know, NES or arcade sprites and putting them in, you know, twice the resolution.

So you had a ton of sprite on the screen. But it was also very tricky to shoot things because you were shooting tiny little bullets, tiny little things. But it did these really cool things for the time. So instead of just having, like, these ranks. It was good. We should talk about the Mac 2 for a minute. Instead of just having like, you know, these ranks of enemies, you had these formations like there would be a set of like 16 enemies that were flying in a square shape. But then the square would like rotate and fly around the screen.

And you had these incredibly wacky formations. And it was done in HyperCard. What? Don't listen to him. Could I do it in HyperCard? Yeah, the Mac 2 came out at 87. I think the SC, same year as SC. I did a big article on that too.

Macintosh 2, some kind of anniversary article. And it was amazing because I interviewed one of the engineers behind it, and they were like, we wanted to go back and make an Apple 2 with a Mac, you know, with slots. And you could do anything you want, expand it however you want. It's an open box.

You know, and you could put like, it had, I think the original had, what, like five slots or something, and you could put five video cards in there and extend the desktop to like all five of them. In 1987, you could get 24-bit color, you could get all kinds of crazy stuff.

It costs like $200,000 to do that. Ridiculous, yeah. But you could do it. I mean, it was incredible. Yeah, I think that sort of eventually evolved into the quadriline, which was sort of like high end, customizable open box version as opposed to, like the SE kind of turned into the Performa, the,

yeah, the SEs. This was the beginning of that era. One of the niches, one of the niches that Apple went over was the people who want the absolute, you know, most graphics you could have on your desk. Yeah, that was a kick. From then through the next decade. They don't have anything, like computer-wise, so they just buy Tesla's. Yeah.

All right, we're going to wrap this up. Let's talk about two last games. The first is Scarab of Raw, which is... I remember playing as a kid, and it's kind of like a rogue-like combined with a first-person adventure. So it's basically an ICOM game combined with the dungeon of Doom, more or less. It's a first-person adventure. You're clicking through, kind of scrolling, you know, wizardry style. but each level, you know, each play-through is randomly generated.

So you're in a pyramid, and it's a nine-level pyramid. And each pyramid, you're descending, so it gets bigger and bigger as you descend. So you start out, it's three-by-three screens. And then you go down a level, it's four-by-four, and then five-by-five, et cetera, et cetera. So the further you get into the game, the more complex it becomes. And, you know, like I said, it's always randomized. There's stamina. You have health, and you have a hunger element.

So you have to find food. You have to find oil for your lantern so you're not plunged into darkness and a grue eat you. There's a lot going on here. And it was a shareware game, wasn't it? I don't, was it? Yeah, I think it was. I don't know. I didn't have this one minute it came out by semi-colon software, but I don't know if it's shareware.

Yeah, I think it was shareware. It was kind of dinky for, you know, a commercial game, but it was awesome for a shareware game. I don't know. It's a pretty substantial game. That's what I'm saying. It was impressive. Down to the bottom of a nine-level pyramid, it's totally randomized, and you're finding three treasures. I mean, it's got that kind of, you know, that definitely, like, rogue net hack, you're searching for a treasure, and then you can either escape or you can keep fighting and hope you don't die against the guardian.

And I really feel like, like I said, I didn't play this at the time when it came out, but looking at it now, I really wonder if this was an inspiration for one of the things we'd probably talk about in the sequel to this episode, Pathways in a Darkness. because that has a lot of similarities. Pathways didn't have the randomization. No, it didn't have the randomization, but just in terms of the mechanics and the look of it. So Pathways being one of Bunchy's early games, which we'll get to it later, Matt games. Talk about that in the 90s episode.

And finally, just to kind of bring things full circle, I'd like to talk about Shufflepuck Cafe, which is a 1989 game developed by Broderbund, Broderbund, whatever, and kind of loops back to Alice. It has the same perspective, yeah. It's a same perspective. It's a real-time game driven with a mouse.

But instead of being like a chess simulation kind of thing, it's more like air hockey. It's air hockey, yeah. So I had this one. This one was cool. So it had this little kind of over-the-shoulder perspective air hockey table. But then at the other end of the table, you had these high-res sprites of your opponents.

And the cool thing about this game is you were, actually playing against characters. And these characters really had characters. So kind of in the vein of something a lot of retronauts, people probably have played a punchout. You had a bunch of characters that all had their own personalities, their own tells, their own play styles. So like the first person you play, the first,

and it was this, there was this sci-fi theme, so they were all weird aliens. And, like, the first one you played them was, you know, this terrible player, and they were really nervous. And their, like, their paddle would, like, vibrate because they were, like, they were jittery because they were nervous. And you'd have one later that, like, there was a player that started out really good, but they were drinking, and they would get worse as the game went on because they were getting drunk. That's amazing.

That's just like a podcast. Yeah, it is. Like this gin that Jeremy gave me. Which is probably why I'm so enthusiastic about these games because of Jeremy's gin. And there was like, you know, there was an Esper who would like use psychonesis on the puck to cheat and like, and a bunch of these characters, you know, there were these big animated sprites so they'd have tells sometimes when they were going to do something. It's just, it lent a lot to the game beyond just being basically Pong, you know, which is what Air Hockey is. But so it's 3D Pong, but it has all this character to it, which made it really cool. I've never played the Mac version of this, but I didn't.

I think it's the original, isn't it? The Shuffle Buck is the original. Yeah, I think it started on Mac. Yeah, I think so. Okay, I remember also, this is, you know, speaking of Steve Moretsky, this is another one of his favorite games. Just, I remember that. Nice. Because he was into really cool, obscure games.

Is that really neat? I don't think Shumblepuck Cafe is that obscure. It was published by broader buttons. It's obscure just in the broad spectrum of fun. Well, I mean, compared to like Super Mario Brothers. But for a 1989 Mac first game, it's a lot of the big ones. Well, I was actually, I did an article about the greatest PC games of all time or something in 2009, and I surveyed a bunch of developers. And he was like the guy, Mertzky was the guy who mentioned these neat Mac games.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun. Interesting. Yeah. All right. So that's basically the 80s for Mac Gaming. We skipped over a few titles, but I think that's a pretty good rundown. And we could definitely go on. And certainly if we wanted to delve into the 90s, that could be another couple of hours.

Yeah, 90s are way different. Yeah, so I think what we're going to do is save the 90s discussion for another episode. Got all kinds of stuff there. Yeah, there'll be plenty to talk about. And we'll wrap this one up. So thanks, guys. Thanks everyone for listening. I hope you learned some interesting things.

things about Macs and definitely check out Archive.org's System 6 emulator, which is good for, should be good for any game made before 1990. Most of these should run on it. System 7 was what, like 91? Yeah, I have System 7 discs that are like 92, and that was 7.something. 7.1, yeah.

7.2 or something. Yeah. So, yeah, that should pretty much allow you to play all of these games. And again, like, if you can find them in the wild, God bless. But it's really hard to play classic Mac games, not only because of the fragility of the media, but also because the Macintosh platform has gone through so many platforms or through so many revisions. Like, it's not that hard to run DOS box and play old DOS games, but Macs are much more difficult because you had, you know, the move to color. You had the move from the 68040 architecture to power PC going from CISC to risk. you had the transition from

classic Mac OS to OS10 where it jumped from like a custom bespoke operating system to a Unix-based system and then you had the jump from Intel. Intel. You lose things to every step. There is a great Mac emulator called VMac that's small and simple and it emulates a Mac-plus era computer.

There are some emilates. And a few of these things were actually ported up. So, like, Silarian 2, got an OS10 port that worked, but it didn't get an Intel port. Yeah. So, like, for some of those, you can still. And I read about that if the source code is lost. Yeah, they lost from remade it. So they have to build it from the ground up.

Yeah, playing power PC games today, Mac games, very tough. Yeah. Yeah. So it's definitely difficult. You can emulate to a certain degree, but it's still pretty tough. So I would say if you're interested, just play the games somehow. It's every man for themselves. Just do whatever you can to survive.

It's a lawless hell out there. The black and light stuff emulates pretty well, but it can be a little tricky getting, you know, the right, because there were different resolutions for different eras, and so you've got to be careful with what your setup is. But definitely worth it because it is a very unique slice of gaming. And it's one that I only intersected with briefly, just because of not having much access to Macs,

but it's still like those old graphics just stand out of my mind because they're so distinct. And the game concepts that came into being, even if they were sort of familiar genres, they still always put unique spins on things. So it's a great little platform, definitely worth exploration. It's an era with some really beautiful stuff that you just don't see anymore because no one does one-bit designs.

I mean, even Game Boy was 2-bit. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, thanks everyone for listening. For Retronauts, this has been Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as Gamesbite. You can find me at Retronauts.com. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com also on iTunes, on the Podcast One network, and so on and so forth. We are, of course, supported by Patreon in addition to those advertisements because we're greedy and we like money and I like being able to eat.

And this is my living now. So please help a poor young podcaster. Actually, I'm not that young. And if you have any money left over, you know, I'd do a Patreon thing too. Patreon.com slash Benj Edwards. You know, I'm just a guy. Jeremy pulled in off the street to talk about the Mac. Benj Edwards.com, Twitter.com

slash Benj Edwards, slash Ben Jeddwards, add infinitum. Yep. I don't have a Patreon, sorry. But I do have a Twitter. I'm Kieran K-I-R-I-N on Twitter. And I actually just started up a new Tumblr for stuff related to this, which will probably have content on it by the time this episode actually goes out. What is that when called?

It is Kieran's Retro Closet. Sorry, there's only one N in Kieran this time, because that's the way I like it better. I just couldn't get that on Twitter. So Kieran's Retro Closet, all one word, dot Tumblr.com. And I'm going to, because it's called that because I actually literally just cleaned out my childhood closets from my parents' houses and got a lot of stuff related to the stuff we're talking about. Some of which I'm giving to Bench, because Venge will make better uses of it than I have, being a retro computing expert. But I'm going to start putting up some photos and stuff on there. So we may have stuff related to these episodes, too.

So you can check that out. All right. Thanks, guys. And that's it. So we'll be back next week with something else. Yeah, let's do a retronauts radio next week. I'm going to mix things up. Mix up the order a little bit. And we'll be back again with another Retronauts East in about a monthish, because why not? So stay tuned. We'll be back to talk at you more. I don't know I'm going to be I'm going to

I'm going to The Moller I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins, says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective

killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.

Thank you.