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  • I would have been really excited about this circa 1999. I mean don't get me wrong, I was grateful for Unreal Tournament and Q3A, and I knew I'd be getting Halo soon, but this is the one game I was really jealous of my friends for.
    by sharkjacobs
  • > The game was originally planned to be released for Mac OS 9 by Valve in 1999, but was cancelled shortly before launch.

    The wildest cancel of all was certainly the impressive Dreamcast port, which was fully playable and basically ready to release but got canned a month before release.

    https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_(Dreamcast_port)

    by lloeki
  • For reference this is roughly period correct for the early iMac models (G3 and DV) that came out in 1998 and 1999, though MacOS 9 didn't ship until later. Impressive porting work.
    by hedgehog
  • Maybe it’s because I’m old, but the classic Mac OS user interface looks so good. I’d trade the current Mac OS UI for it in a heartbeat. I’m already sticking with Sequoia because I don’t want Liquid Glass making my eyes sore.
    by felixding
  • More and more, I wonder if projects like this (I assume they're made possible 'all of a sudden' because of AI coding tools) are going to eventually breathe new life into dozens of "obsolete" platforms long ago deemed too costly to keep supporting. Maybe we'll be able to daily drive OS9 with modern browsers and bugfixes. Or for those of us less masochistic, say, Windows 2000 or NextStep!
    by xp84
  • The most interesting thing about this link, for me, is seeing that there's an open-source recreation of GoldSrc [0]? That's apparently been around since 2011 [1]? I'm stunned I haven't heard about this before. Very cool.

    [0] https://github.com/fwgs/xash3d-fwgs

    [1] https://www.moddb.com/engines/xash3d-engine

    by wk_end
  • In one of the most infamous stories of the era, Half-Life was officially ported to Mac OS back in the year 2000 by Logicware/MacPlay but got shut down by Valve at the last minute.

    I've watched interviews with Rebecca Heineman (one of the devs involved) on the topic. It did not make her happy.

    Here's an article from the era:

    https://www.gamespot.com/articles/mac-half-life-canceled/110...

    Interview with Rebecca Heineman:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I

    (skip to timecode 1:36:41 for the Half-Life details)

    by gilgoomesh
  • Nice, I'm surprised it took this long! My first experience of playing Quake 1 in my home was an unauthorized source port which ran in System 7, I believe was called "HackQuake", ported from stolen source code from CrackDotCom apparently[0][1] .. For me as a kid getting insanely impatient to play Quake, this was a godsend! Even if the performance was brutal and firing a rocket caused the framerate to halve. Played it at 320x200 pixel-doubled just to eke out that extra little bit of performance. Anyway, the point is that HL probably could have been running on Mac since day one, if someone had spent the time to port it!

    [0] https://www.wired.com/1997/01/hackers-hack-crack-steal-quake...

    [1] https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive/blob/...

    by amatecha

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Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9 · Birbla