The Secret History of Mac Gaming - A Great Read!

General - Oct 1, 2025

Recently I was gifted the book ‘The Secret History of Mac Gaming’ by Richard Moss. It was an awesome read, bringing back memories from my childhood and teenage years when me and my brother played almost every game available on the Mac. We were a Mac-only household so we would scavenge the early internet and magazine disks for games and demos to play. Just like today, most games came out on the DOS/Windows PC, but you would be surprised how many Mac-exclusive games were published. It was a thriving market with solo developers creating awesome games mostly distributed as shareware. This book makes sure not to miss a single one!

About the book

The book is published by Bitmap Books and if you are familar with their releases, you’ll know what to expect; A beautifully bound hard-cover book with great typesetting and full color imagery on high-quality paper. You’ll read all about classics such as Armor Alley, F/A 18 Hornet, Solarian, Crystal Quest, Glider Pro, Marathon and many more. With great screenshots and stories from the developers that will take you right back to the 80s and 90s.

Written by award-winning journalist and game historian Richard Moss, The Secret History of Mac Gaming draws on a combination of archive material and around 80 interviews with key figures from the era to tell the story of those communities and the game developers who survived and thrived in an ecosystem that was serially ignored by the outside world. It’s a book about people who followed their hearts first and market trends second, showing how clever, quirky, and downright wonderful video games could be.

Wait, what?!

When I reached the chapter on John Calhoun’s Glider and Glider Pro for the Mac, I was shocked and surprised to find my own name in the book. Mind you, I did not have anything to do with the original. I merely helped bringing over a source port of the original game named Aerofoil by Eric Lasota to modern macOS. So I guess that will be my 2 seconds of fame. Unless my own Mac-exlusive game Uptown makes any waves of course ;)