Last modified: 2/14/98

You too can stroll down memory lane remembering these old favorites. These are some of the pioneers of net gaming, and they proved how fun it can be. I particularly remember playing Armor Alley in the Mac Lab after hours in college. We played late into the night on super-fast (for that time) Mac IIci's. Back when I first started this site, Armor Alley was one of the first games I thought of, only to be disappointed to find out that Armor Alley's publisher had gone out of business.

Ancient History...

As near as I can tell, all Mac network gaming can be traced back to the following two games. Besides possibly some lame multiplayer text-based game on mainframes, these can probably be considered the first networkable games of all personal computers! Another Mac first? ;-)

I am no stranger to computers; yes, I remember upgrading my Apple II+ from 48k to a whopping 64k of RAM (how many programs do you have now that can even run in 64k? I bet none). However, I must admit I wasn't net savvy back then (was there a "net" back then? ;-). My idea of multiplayer gaming was crowding around the keyboard to play Microsoft Decathlon!

So, I'll let those who remember best tell it. Gather around the rocking chair kiddies...

MazeWars, MazeWars+

4 players?

AppleTalk.

A very old Mac.

MacroMind

Many of you "old timers" emailed me about these very first Macintosh games. I think John Pugh says it best:

Rick, you young pup!

Armor Alley wasn't the first network game for the Mac. That belonged to some Apple thing that never got past alpha and only ran on the OLD AppleTalk stack using the modem port instead of the printer port. I can't even remember what it was called now. I would have to ransack my old 400K disks to find a copy. It was basically trying to find your way through a maze, but there was a invisible zone in the middle which made it difficult to get through. There were also teleporters, I think. I think the name was Bus'd Out or something.

After that came a hacked port of MazeWar, the game where everyone is a giant black eyeball with a tail. It was fun but broke a long time ago and was never fixed. AppleTalk only. I think it was 4 player.

After that there was finally a commercial release of MazeWar which was a 4 level thing that ran until the Mac II came out. It didn't like running on a color screen. It also ran on AppleTalk only. I think this version allowed up to 16 players. It gave players a choice of 4 or 5 characters to be and allowed you to shoot missles through the maze.

It's hard to believe that Doom and Marathon grew from these humble beginnings.

Download MazeWars (46k) - Caution: this does not work on modern Macs!

Jon Pugh currently works for Apple. He is also well known for Jon's Commands AppleScript Additions. His homepage is probably one of the more interesting you'll ever read: check out his "What are you doing to oppose the Microsoft juggernaut?" section.

Bus'd Out

Can Anyone Remember?

AppleTalk.

A very old Mac.

Here's another account of those early days. Did they have cars back then? ;-)

As you note, the 'original' Net Mac game was Maze Wars (Maze Warz?) that was developed at Apple during AppleTalk development. But, as Obi Wan said, 'there is another...'

Ever heard of 'Bus'd Out'? (as in 'Bust Out') I only remember playing it a few times, but as I remember, it was a playing field that had obstacles and other players, but the field was 'in the dark' and anything more than a few feet away was black. I really don't remember many details, but I am sure that it existed. I may even have a copy on some old disks.

The reason that I am sure of this is that a group of friends had what I consider the first 'net game party', at the first MacWorld Expo in Feb. '85. AppleTalk and the LaserWriter were introduced at that show. One of the guys got some info about AppleTalk before the show (Developer info or leak? I don't know.), and he built an AppleTalk 'hack' net from Radio Shack parts. One evening during the show, the group met at a pizza parlor in San Fran, and we had (at the peak) about 20 Mac 128's and 512's on two nets running MazeWarz and Buss'ed Out.

So, we invaded a pizza place, set up a 20 Mac net, ran some net games (buying lots of pizza and drinks, the guy stayed open later than normal for us), and left the pizza place as we found it... in Feb. '85. Can anybody beat that date???? I know they were running this stuff inside Apple before, and that there were some limited 'net' games on mainframes before, but this was a 'hit and run' 'plug and play' net game party in '85. We have done this type of party many times since, but I would think that this one was the first.

Indeed, that was one of the first times that I was ABSOLUTLY POSITIVE that the Mac was going to make it. Up to that point, I loved the Mac, but was less sure about it's success. When I saw this 'net party', how easily it came together, AND WORKED, that was one of the first of several moments when I knew that Mac was going to 'make it'.

Jack Kobzeff

Whereas Jack Kobzeff's account is of being at the first network party, the following account is from one of the people responsible for organizing the party! Read on...

I (David Every) appologize for any misunderstanding in my first telling of this story -- I over simplified and didn't give the others enough credit.

I was ONE of the individuals involved, along with Dave Wilcox, Mark Murphy and Kerry Garrison. We all were involved in the design and manufacture of these "quasi-legal" pirate AppleTalk boxes.

We were also involved in AMUC -- the Anahiem Mac User Club (Anahiem, CA.) later called "Another Mac User Club".

Mark and Dave had a friend inside of Apple who got them the hardware docs for AppleTalk in October 84 (which was due to be released in Jan 85's expo).

The design of AppleTalk (hardware) is very simple, so we just ripped it off with some simple modifications. After spending great effort trying to find an isolation transformer and connectors that met Apple's specs we gave up and decided instead to use RCA connectors and speaker cables for the boxes, and use miniphone jacks to connect the boxes together. We made a little star network (with no electronic protection).

Dave Wilcox and Kerry Garrison got to manufacturing the boxes, so they would have something to sell. Mark Murphy publicized that we were going to have a party up at the first expo (as did Rusty Hodge of the MouseHole BBS).

In January 85, Apple first showed their "AppleTalk" network and the MacOffice, and that night we had a Pizza-Party in China-Town and started slapping the Macs together. We took over the entire pizza place (at least the back of it), and ended up have multiple tables and multiple networks playing MazeWarz and Bus'd Out. We were a very roudy bunch of dweebs.

Dave and Kerry sold a bunch of those boxes and cables, and it financed our trip up there. (All of us crammed into one room at the Holiday Inn, taking turns on the bed and hiding from management because we said there was only one person in the room).

Kerry Garrison noted a few years later noted that if we had used Phone Jacks (RJ11) instead of RCA connectors, then we would have created Faralon's phone-net years before they did. Of course we didn't have any protection for power-spikes, and we would have fried our machines if anything went wrong. But we were young and stupid. ;-)

Technically we got pirated Beta's of the Games a few months earlier from inside of Apple (same source)... this was what proved that the jerry-rigged AppleTalk would actually work.

David K. Every
MacKiDo Temple
"The Power of the Macintosh Way"

David is also the webmaster of MacKiDo Temple, probably the best Mac Evangelist site I've seen! Any Mac loyalist should stop by. David writes on everything from buying mailorder, to software reviews, to the darkside of Microsoft. The Darkside has many innocuously-titled articles, such as "Whatever Happened to DR-DOS?" (an article about how Microsoft, through dirty marketing and politics forced a better product out of the market), "Where's Stacker?" (another fine example of a superior product that "disappeared" from the Market), and "The Truth about Adobe, TrueType, and OpenType". I guarantee you will not see Microsoft in the same light after reading these and the rest of the 'Darksides'! Not all is Microsoft bashing; articles such as "Fun at WWDC" is a humorous inside look at what it's really like at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (the LaserWriter easter egg is the most amazing thing I've ever heard!).

I guess I shouldn't be surprised when someone, somewhere, was able to dig up a copy of this game. Thomas Meschter found this in his collection. The most amazing thingis that the game Still runs-- even on my PowerMac running System 8 and in millions of colors! It's incredible, and I don't know who should get more credit; Apple for building in incredible backward compatibility, or the original programmers for writing such clean code that it works 13 years later!

After reading your story on the first Mac network party, it occurred to me that I'd seen that game somewhere before. Sure enough, I searched my collection and found a copy of Bus'd Out, version 0.25a. This may very likely been the version used at that pizza party, it carries a modification date of May 3rd, 1984! Its about 40K in size and runs in 384K of RAM.

But wait! It gets better! For Bus'd Out v0.25a STILL WORKS (at least on system 7.5.3 revision 2.2, I haven't tried it out on anything later). I'm not sure if you could actually play it against someone over a network, but you can run it without crashing.

Apparently, the application doesn't check the monitor bit-depth, happily drawing everything in black and white. This makes sense, because back then 256 colors wasn't an option, much less "Thousands" or "Millions." Also, Bus'd Out v0.25a doesn't check to see if an AppleTalk network is present or if AppleTalk is even active; it just grabs the Printer port for it's own use and doesn't let go (even after quitting, so you have to restart if you actually want to, say, print).

Anyway, It's kinda nice to see people able to try this out again.

-Thomas Meschter

Download Bus'd Out (28k) - Amazingly compatible with even modern PowerMacs!

Got a story to tell? Email me!

Armor Alley 1.1s1

1 to 4 players.

AppleTalk, modem.

Any Color or B/W Mac.

Armor Alley is one of the first networkable games (at least that I'm aware of) for the Macintosh, allowing up to four players to join. Based on the old Apple ][ game 'Rescue Raiders', this game combines arcade action and strategy in attempt to take over the enemies base. With a limited budget, you order up drone tanks, troops, missile launchers, etc. to march toward the enemy (while your enemy is doing the same). Look at a Armor Alley Screenshot (5k).

As I said in the intro, I was introduced to multiplayer gaming with this game, wasting hours in the Mac lab. Being so poor we could barely afford the cheap beer we smuggled in, we only had two legitimate copies of the game, and it would get very tedious after a while to overcome the networked serial code. But, it was that or study, so we were quite persistant. I remember at one point that a PC version was supposed to be released, with promises of modem games between Macs and PCs! Crossplatform gaming was inconceivable to us at that time (if you thought PCs are dumb now, you should've seen 'em before Windows 3.0 existed!). But, it's a mystery to me whether a PC version was ever released. I've never seen it.

I've made the last known version of Armor Alley available for people who need an updated version. This should not really be a problem since it requires serial numbers to unlock the game (no, I will not provide them), otherwise the game is only playable in demo mode.

Download Armor Alley 1.1s1 (332k) - This version is compatible with Mac's that cannot go lower than 256 colors (such as PCI Macs).

Bolo 0.99.7

Bolo resides on the NetGames pages because it is still supported and has a large active following even today on the internet (various utilities are still in active development). However, I thought a courtesy mention here on the 'yesteryear' page was appropriate since it's also the very first Mac (and possible any personal computer) game to support direct TCP and actually be playable over the internet (especially as an action game). Visit the Netgames entry for description and links to downloads, utilities, support, and fan pages.

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat

1 or 2 players.

AppleTalk.

Any color or B/W Mac

An older flight simulator for the Macintosh. If flight sims are your thing, check out FA/18 Hornet (for Appletalk networks) or Warbirds (for you internet surfers).

The "Unoffical" CYAC FTP site - Download a demo and optional replacement sounds.

UPDATE 7/13/96: Chuck Yeager's Air Combat is now available in a multipack bundle, along with Power Poker and others!

Falcon MC 1.0.2

1 or 2 players.

AppleTalk.

Any color Mac (must be able to set monitor to 16 colors or B/W).

This game is a true classic for the Macintosh -- it's one of the first flight sims available (second to Microsoft Flight Simulator, of course, which was available as early as the Mac 512k). The Mac version of Falcon always lagged behind in features and release dates when compared to it's DOS counterpart. But then again, we Mac users have grown accustomed to that! :-(

Strangely, while Falcon has basically been abandoned by Spectrum Holobyte, it is still available for purchase at many mail-order places. So if you don't have the latest PowerMac iron to run highly-detailed, texture-mapped flight sims, you may want to consider Falcon MC.

HyperBattleship

1 to 2 players.

AppleTalk.

Any Mac!

HyperCard is one of those on-again, off-again projects at Apple. For years HyperCard was wildly popular in schools because of the relative ease in creating and programming "stacks" that were actually useful and did something. My crowning achievement with HyperCard was programming a "flashcard" stack that I actually used to quiz myself on vocabulary for my foreign language class. Schools found all kinds of uses for HyperCard, from rudimentary databases, to teaching kids how to do (very) basic animation.

For years, Hypercard came with every Mac. Long before the Internet, the gaming forums of online services like America Online, CompuServe, and GEnie were choked with Hypercard "games". These were typically crappy little graphical adventure-type games, and generally pissed you off after realising you spent the last half hour downloading this junk over a 2400 baud modem (yes, that's 12 times slower than a 28.8 modem!).

Hypercard was eventually starting to show it's age. It was notoriously slow, and even faster Macs weren't helping that much. Apple eventually released 2.0 which was a major feature upgrade, one of which was adding networking capabilities. HyperBattleship was created to show off that ability. If you can find a late version of HyperCard (version 2.3.5 is the most current), you can still run HyperBattleship.

A networkable computer game of the classic Battleship board game. Apple released this Hypercard stack back when 2.0 was brand-new to show the capability of the then new Hypercard 2.0.

Download HyperBattleShip (135k)

Update:

Hypercard may yet come full circle. Rumors are that Apple will resurrect Hypercard and use it as an crossplatform authoring tool for Quicktime! Stay tuned...

Minotaur

2 to 7 players.

AppleTalk, modem.

Any Color or B/W Mac.

So Bungie is in the big leagues with their blockbuster hit Myth: The Fallen Lords. Long before that, they were the champions of the Mac gaming community with their ever popular Marathon series. And even some Mac gaming old timers will recall the predicessor to Marathon (and the first true 3D game on the Mac) as Pathways into Darkness. But, did you know they had two games previous to that?

Bungie's second ever game was called Minotaur. Marathon networked was a pretty radical idea in it's time, but it's not Bungie's first network game. Minotaur would claim that title. As a matter of fact, Minotaur was a network only game, meaning there were no solo levels. Considering the extremely limited target audience at the time, I doubt Minotaur was all that successful. But that was before the days when Bungie discovered how much fun it was to make money! ;-)

Bungie's own product description, "Minotaur is the ultimate in groupware entertainment in which you battle your opponents over modem, localtalk, ethernet, or serial cable in real time. You create your own charactor and explore the labriths of Crete to find weapons, spells, magical items and a whole lot more! Use these along with your skill and wit to outsmart your opponents. Fast action, amazing color graphics and digitized sound set the pace. Multiplayer capability right out of the box. Compatible with all Macs from the Mac Plus to the PowerMac."

Here's a screenshot on bungie's history page.

RoboSport

1 to 4 players.

AppleTalk, modem.

Any Color or B/W Mac (must be able to set monitor to 16 colors or B/W).

Robosport was a fun little strategy game (with elements of action). The idea was you programmed a team of robots to kill off your opponents robots (while he does the same). Each turn, a robot only had a certain amount of 'steps' it could handle before the next turn. For example, you 'program' robot 1 to run across an alley, then crouch and go into scan mode (shoot any detected enemies) while the other robots cross the alley. Naturally, you cannot see how your opponent is programming his robots. After all sides programmed their robots, you watch and see how well they perform against each other. After the turn is over, you continue, making adjustments for enemy movements.

I just found out that Robosport is still available by purchasing directly from Maxis. You must be able to set your monitor to 16 colors (which rules out newer Mac's), but the price is right: only $9.95!! While still technically available, the game hasn't been updated in years and won't run on newer machines, so it will reside here on the 'Yesteryear' page.

Networkable Mac Games Tip:

RoboSport is is being revived by one of the original programmers; the code is being updated, bugs are getting fixed, and NetSprockets are being incorporated so that netplay over the internet is now possible! Go to the The Unoffical Robosport Page for more info.

Download the 1.2a1 Updater (1.3Mb)

Related Web Sites:

The Unoffical Robosport Page - has a patch that makes Robosport compatible with PowerMac's and 256 colors! Plus alternate arena's, an arena editor, FAQ's, and more!

The Maxis homepage.

NetTrek 3.0

1 to 5 players.

AppleTalk.

B/W Macs Only!

Sit at the helm of your very own U.S.S. Enterprise. This game has been around for a long while. It even enjoyed a stint as a commercial game (NetTrek 3.0), which, I understand, is still compatible even with today's Macintoshes.

Download Version 2.0 - The old 2.0 is still available in the info-mac archives, but you need to meet the stiffer computing requirements (i.e. you must be able to set your monitor to B/W ;-).

Power Poker 1.4

1 to 10 players.

AppleTalk (including ARA).

Mac Requirements?

A networkable Poker game.

UPDATE 7/13/96: Power Poker is available in a multipack bundle, along with Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and other oldies.

Super Maze Wars 1.2

1 to 8 players.

AppleTalk.

A Color Mac.

Apple is including this game on the hard drives of some of the new PowerBooks. A co-worker and I had a chance to, umm, 'test' out the new infrared ports on the Powerbooks with this game. The game uses vector-style graphics, which lowers the processor requirements and thus opens this game to a broader audience. Heck, it doesn't have a bit of native code and runs great on the PowerPC Powerbooks!

Battle unrelenting robot enemies or networked human opponents, or both, in Super Maze Wars, the hot, arcade-style, 3-D action game. More than just a shoot'em-up, Super Maze Wars tests your cunning, strategic thinking, and skill.

• As you move through the maze at the controls of your MazeCruiser, hunt down and eliminate your adversaries in a variety of gameplay scenarios.
• Perform surgical strikes with smart missiles that lock on target and track your opponents down.
• Improve your weapons and maneuvering capabilities by retrieving capsules throughout the maze.
• Outfox your competitors by skillfully using radar, shields, shots and speed.
• Stunning 256-color graphics and sounds enhance the endless challenge.

Super Maze Wars is available NOW in a one- and two-user packs. For ordering information, send e-mail at Callisto1@aol.com.

Super Tetris 1.0

1 or 2 players.

AppleTalk, serial.

Any B/W or Color Mac.

Good old fashion Tetris game with the ability to challenge and play against opponents in real-time over the network.

The low system requirements and the easy learning curve of this game makes it perfect for virtually any two Mac's connected together (black-and-white mode runs fine on an Mac Plus). I've seen this game sold as low as $17.95 at the Cyberian Outpost, an on-line/mail-order store.

Vette

1 or 2 players.

AppleTalk, modem.

Any Color or B/W Mac (must be able to set monitor to 16 colors or B/W.)

A cool racing game! Hop behind the wheel of a Vette and race through the streets of San Francisco.

If your into driving games and own a PowerMac, check out some of the other multiplayer racing games on the NetGames List (such as Indy Car Racing II, Nascar, and others)!