The Macintosh changed video games. It challenged the medium to be more than child's play and quick reflexes. It made human-computer interaction friendly, inviting, and intuitive. Mac gaming led to much that is now taken for granted by PC gamers and spawned some of the biggest franchises in video game history ―including Myst, Halo, and SimCity. It allowed anyone to create games and playful software with ease, and gave indie developers a home for their products.
It welcomed strange ideas and encouraged experimentation. It fostered passionate and creative communities who inspired and challenged developers to do better and to follow the Mac mantra: 'think different'.
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.
The Secret History of Mac Gaming also features guest chapters from Craig Fryar, Apple's first Mac games evangelist and the co-creator of hit game Spectre, as well as specially-created divider illustrations and cover art by graphic designer and pixel artist JJ Signal, all styled in the gorgeous 1-bit aesthetics of early Macintosh games. At 480 pages long, The Secret History of Mac Gaming features eye-catching coloured page edges, a hardback cover printed with pantone inks and a colour-coded bookmark ribbon. As with all our books, we use thread sewn binding for extra durability and print lithographically on high-quality paper to showcase the gorgeous visuals as they deserve.
This newly-expanded edition adds around 70 pages of extra content, including a foreword by The 7th Guest co-creator and id Software and Apple alum Graeme Devine, plus an annotated timeline, over 60 extra images, an icon gallery, and more than 6,000 extra words added to the chapter narratives ― on top of the 115,000 words from the 1st edition ― covering a variety of additional game and developer stories, including the tales behind Snood, Chaos Overlords, The Dungeon of Doom, and more. It also revises and updates the design, based on reader feedback, to provide a better reading experience.
About the publisher:
Bitmap Books work with the world's most experienced writers, designers and gaming experts to create meticulously researched, visually ambitious retro gaming books. As a design-led publisher, visual quality matters to us. We don’t just obsessively pursue the best printing quality currently available. We want to constantly push the envelope when it comes to expectations about printing techniques.
Bitmap Books work with the world’s most experienced writers, designers and gaming experts to create meticulously researched, visually ambitious retro gaming books. As a design-led publisher, visual quality matters to us. We don’t just obsessively pursue the best printing quality currently available. We want to constantly push the envelope when it comes to expectations about printing techniques.
