The Agony of Mac Gaming, Volume 1

For the first 40 some-odd years of my life, I have been mostly a console-only gamer. Or arcades. I’m definitely old enough for that. I dabbled in PC games from time to time but struggled with keeping up with the technology needed to play the latest and greatest… and sometimes even getting the games to work was a fruitless battle that left me crawling back to more pleasant console shores. However, between modern consoles having their own issues and nigh-endless patches, alongside having kids that will orchestrate a coup over gaming time faster than one can say “I want to play Mario Kart on the big TV!”, I started looking back at gaming on computers, especially as it seems that the weird kinks of playing there have largely stabilized thanks to services like Steam and general settling of technology as a whole.

Before this epiphany, I decided to complete my transition to the Apple ecosystem that I had already been a part of with my iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch, etc etc etc. I had a functional Windows desktop, but it was getting older, as was my Windows-based latptop. So I bought the redesigned iMac in 2021, the first M1 model. It has been a great companion over these last four years for doing everything except playing video games, though admittedly at the start it was something I saw as a novelty. Installing Steam and finding what I could install was fun, and I was impressed that anything that did work ran really, really well thanks to the architecture of the computer. There’s something to be said about the more unified setup and less variety in specs that can lead to more focused, dare I say “console-like” performance. After a while, when I started thinking I could maybe play some quality stuff on Mac - especially when they started talking about getting serious about it - I started getting serious about it too.

It’s a much improved world out here, and while I don’t think anyone will really take it seriously unless, like, Apple invests money into actually making exclusive big-budget games like they have with Apple TV+, it’s possible to keep busy playing games in the Mac ecosystem. There's a lot of heartbreak, confusion, and utter frustration behind that statement, but I mean Cyberpunk 2077 just shipped on Mac and that bad boy is an absolute achievement if you ask me. Plus it’s on Steam, and while it’s a crapshoot out there using Valve’s service, it remains the best place to get Mac compatible games compared to the jumbled mess that is the Mac App Store.

I want to get this out of the way first: if you begin this journey into Steam and perhaps pull up your PC-based library to see what’s compatible, you will reach Emotion One, and that is utter agony. The sheer amount of games incompatible due to not even being ported to Mac in the first place is astronomical, and it will likely leave you dejected off the bat. I too was really hoping I could natively play the Yakuza games on my Mac, but no. Also I may tell you the horrors of using Parallels Desktop and trying to play some of these games with an M4 Mac mini someday… but today is not that day. Consider this a gift, as this piece may cause enough despair as is.

Anyway. If we just leave it at games that are Mac compatible, the pickings are slimmer, but if you drill down into the Mac-specific store (side note: I really wish you could just load the store and it knows you’re a Mac Master Race user and just filters out all Windows games from the start, but you have to instead find the category for Mac. Also I’m very much kidding about the Mac Master Race thing), it’s possible to peruse through a massive list of available games. Well, once you filter out the endless amounts of insanely bad looking porn games that seemingly have no issue being Mac compatible. Even then, however, you may open a game and see this very cursed image:

This is probably the most common thing you will see when you pull up some older games that otherwise would be perfect to play. I will give you a quick sample of 6 very popular titles that do not run:

• Half-Life
• Half-Life 2 | HL2 Episodes 1/2
• Portal
• Portal 2
• Left 4 Dead
• Left 4 Dead 2

What do these have in common? They are Valve games that they have not updated to run on 64-bit Apple platforms, but would run on macOS Mojave as 32-bit programs. Now Valve just recently updated the Steam client to native 64-bit, where prior it survived via Rosetta, Apple’s Intel translation language for M1. The hope is that with that update we’ll see their games get updated to work, but there’s no guarantees. Given Valve’s penchant for always updating their games rather than actually making new ones like you know Half-Life 3 what the hell guys, at least there’s a nonzero chance that it happens.

That said there are other oddities with what is compatible and what’s not. Borderlands 2, a shoddy sequel to a great original, is compatible on 64-bit, but the “Pre-Sequel” game that came out later is stuck in 32-bit land. Explain that one. Or how Bioshock 1 and 2 remastered are playable but Bioshock Infinite is not. I know, that game too is not well-regarded compared to the first two games, but it’s just an odd thing given they did remaster it for consoles and I think it was updated on PC as well. Why not do it if you did the first two games? Also while Batman: Arkham City works on Apple Silicon, the original Arkham Asylum and the successor game Arkham Origins are not. There’s a real lack of rhyme or reason to what works and what doesn’t.

The one thing that sticks with me as I reviewed my library to see what worked or not is that these are of course old games. Who really is going to care that they can’t play Bioshock Infinite in 2025? This can be true, but also be a commentary on PC gaming, which is considered evergreen in that a game you bought 10-20 years ago still works. Can still play Doom, no? Not on Mac! If you’re gonna put a game up on a store and claim it’s a “Mac” game, but only work on an OS that was outdated in 2019 when Catalina shipped? That’s 6 years, my dog, time to either remove it as a Mac game or figure out how to update the game to 64-bit compatibility. Newer games, of course, are just fine and work natively without issues if they are ported to the system. Mac has a lot better support from small, indie developers, seeing the platform as an opportunity to thrive where there is less competition, and also less taxing hardware requirements, in theory. This is probably why Steam is just overwhelmed with bad, cheap, cash grab porn games that would drown out the rest of the Mac compatible games if you don’t filter them out. It’s bad.

Real bad.

Admittedly, Apple holds some fault for these incompatibility problems. Their move to Apple Silicon has meant the complete abandonment of 32-bit apps, and while Rosetta exists to translate Intel-based apps to work on Apple Silicon, it doesn’t mean 32-bit apps will run through it. And now that Apple is completely ditching Intel-based platforms once we get to macOS 27 next year, there won’t be much room for error as everything will need to work with Apple Silicon. I feel like Valve will at least throw a bone to updating their games, as they’re always popular even today, but the rest? Unlikely. It probably doesn’t make financial sense. The hope is that going forward - if Apple keeps at it, anyway - this won’t be an issue and we’ll see big games without compatibility issues. This may mean a lot of Mac App Store exclusives, but it is what it is. I have a lot to say on that subject as well, but to keep this piece from spiraling out of control, I’ll bring it up some other day.