There are a fair number of collectible Mac games, but, overall, the Mac market has never held much interest for collectors.
I suspect this can be traced back to Apple's lack of interest in the Mac games market for much of the machine's early history. Initially, it looked down its nose at games. While the Mac II was in fact a potentially excellent games machine, Apple never tried to sell it as one.
The upshot is that, without much encouragement from the top, few game publishers invested heavily in the Mac market. (To be sure, there are exceptions, like Bungie, Cassady & Greene, pre-Activision Infocom, early Cyan, and, later on, companies like GT Interactive's MacSoft). Most publishers poked a toe in the water for a game or three, found it freezing cold and spent rest of the afternoon lying on their towel. :)
Another upshot is that most of the people who bought Macs weren't gamers ... or weren't gamers first. They were artists, writers, video production people and so on ... or just people with an interest in computing and money to burn. (Until the appearance of the iMac, the Mac was also too expensive to be embraced by the mass market, which also helped kill off its the gaming potential.)
I think Apple created a self-fulfilling prophecy: It acted as if the Mac wasn't a games machine and, eventually, it wasn't.
By the time Apple did an about-face in the mid to late '90s, it was too late to make up for a decade of neglect, and the philosophy it adopted was (I think) misguided. When it finally embraced games (under John Scully, I think), Apple was all about encouraging ports of PC titles and not Mac-specific or Mac-first games (which have almost vanished; the only recent one I can think of is Alida). It's as if Apple willingly accepted second-class status in the games market, and was happy to have even that.
The sports-game market seems to have a different ethic. In another genre, NBA Live 97 might be considered collectible; as a sports game, it's just old. I suspect sports gamers are so geared to playing with the current rosters that they don't look back as much as, say, adventure gamers.
Peter
Jim Leonard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I was just amazed by this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=51333&item=5703687968
One bid, six games in good condition, $8? I have two questions based on this
occurance:
1. Is there just no market for Macintosh software collectables? Why the hell not?
2. Along those lines, how come there's no market for Sports game collectables
(any platform)?
Normally I'd rack up #2 as the "if it's not an adventure, it's not collectable"
mentality that 95% of the software collecting scene shares, but that doesn't
explain #1. I'm very confused...!
--
Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/
A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/
Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/
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