Classic Mac action and arcade games

The Macintosh was sold as a serious machine, and for its first few years Apple did very little to encourage anyone to think otherwise. The action games that appeared on it anyway were made by small teams who liked the hardware — its sharp screen, its mouse, its sound — and built things that could not have been made the same way anywhere else. Many of them are still among the best-looking games of their decade. Everything below runs in a browser tab.

The black-and-white years

Dark Castle is the one people remember. A platformer from Silicon Beach Software with digitised sound, drawn in pure black and white, controlled with the keyboard and the mouse together, and notoriously hard. Its programmer, Jonathan Gay, went on to create the software that became Flash. Beyond Dark Castle is the sequel and every bit as unforgiving. Lode Runner is the Macintosh version of the classic dig-and-collect puzzle-platformer, Mouse Stampede is one of the very few pure arcade score-chasers the machine got in 1985, and Skyfox put a flight combat game on a nine-inch monochrome screen.

Colour arrives

When the Macintosh II brought colour in 1987, Crystal Quest was one of the first games to use it: fly around a single screen collecting crystals, avoid everything else, reach the exit. It is simple, very fast, and has a sound design people still quote. Crystal Crazy is its stranger sequel. Shufflepuck Café is air hockey in an alien bar against a cast of opponents with real personalities, and Prince of Persia is Jordan Mechner's rotoscoped platformer in its Macintosh release.

The shareware golden age

The early 1990s is where Mac action games found their own voice, mostly through shareware. Maelstrom took Asteroids and gave it rendered rocks, a real soundtrack and screen-shaking weight; it is still one of the best arcade games on any Macintosh. Arashi did the same for Tempest. Glypha is Joust in an Egyptian tomb, and Glider PRO, from the same author, is a paper aeroplane riding air vents through a house full of hazards — gentle, clever, and open source today. Later there is Avara, Mighty Mike, Ferazel's Wand and Space Debris, and a long tail of smaller games made by one or two people in their spare time.

Sport and speed

The action category here also holds the sports games: One on One, Dr. J against Larry Bird; Earl Weaver Baseball, which modelled real managerial strategy; Sierra Championship Boxing; and The Duel: Test Drive II, a Ferrari against a Porsche on a road full of other people's lanes.

Playing them now

Action games are the demanding end of emulation, and most of these run at the speed they were meant to on any recent laptop. Use a keyboard where a game asks for one; phones work for the mouse-driven titles and struggle with the rest. Several of the colour games ask to switch the monitor to 256 colours when they start — say yes, which is what they expect. Each title's page lists its controls, and the controls sheet on the player shows them again while you play.