Actually, Al was hired as an Apple Fellow in 1985. His first project was "Trojan" a 68000 mac on an ISA card that mixed EGA and square pixel Mac video. I was the Mac-side programmer on the project. Marketing killed it before it got from ATG to product development.
That is wild! That would have been an interesting product.
The justification for the Cray was to experiment with what could be done if you had a Macintosh with the power of a Cray. It had a pretty fancy frame buffer attached to it and some pretty sophisticated anti-aliased rendering was produced.
Frame buffer attached to Cray? Or Mac with a fancy framebuffer and offloading to the Cray? Pretty wild.
About the only video I know that escaped from Valley Green 3 was the title and end credits for "Pencil Test" which weren't produced on a Mac, they were done on the Cray (I was the person responsible for pulling all of the frame sequences together from the Mac II distributed render farm and generating the D1 tape).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXPHlQuXWR0 -- : Ethan O'Toole
