MacSoft

» see macsoftgames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Peter Tamte founded MacSoft in 1993 as a subsidiary of WizardWorks, and the product was never a game of its own. It was somebody else's game, rebuilt to run on Mac OS and sold in a box, with a side business in productivity software. For most of the 1990s that was a real market with almost nobody serving it.

The ownership moved twice. GT Interactive bought WizardWorks in 1996 and split MacSoft off as its own operation. GT was later renamed Infogrames, Inc. On 30 January 2003 Infogrames sold MacSoft to Destineer, a company Tamte had started in 2001 after leaving Bungie. That put him back in charge of a business he had founded ten years before. The headquarters stayed in Plymouth, Minnesota throughout.

The catalog is a recognizable shelf. Age of Empires and its two sequels, Age of Mythology, Halo: Combat Evolved, Quake, Unreal Tournament 2004, Max Payne, Civilization II, Fallout, Neverwinter Nights with both expansions, Railroad Tycoon 3, Zoo Tycoon 2. Underneath the famous titles sat the quieter half of the business: Scrabble, Monopoly, Dora the Explorer, Blue's Clues. A Mac household in 2003 that bought a game at all had a good chance of buying it from MacSoft.

MacSoft's product was a box on an American shelf, and the shelf is where this company and I never met. The pitch was to pay full retail a second time for a game you might already own, in order to play it on a machine with single-digit market share. Turkey in those years had Windows beige boxes and effectively no Mac retail, so there was no shelf for that pitch to sit on. The nearest I got to any of this was the Windows original, years before anybody thought to port it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ forty percent of the mac shelf ~

Inside Mac Games visited the office in 1999 and counted six employees. MacSoft's own memorial page claims that in the late 1990s nearly 40 percent of all Mac games sold in the United States were published by MacSoft, and puts the lifetime output at more than 150 titles between 1993 and 2010, games and productivity software together. Six people can reach a number like that because the expensive part was already paid for by somebody else. The job was making a finished Windows game run on a different processor and then getting the box into a store.

That business depended on a gap, and Apple closed the gap from both ends. The 2006 move to Intel meant a Mac could eventually run Windows outright. Steam arrived on Mac OS X in 2010 and removed the store from the equation, and the publishers who had once licensed their back catalogs to a specialist in Minnesota began shipping their own Mac builds. What ended MacSoft was not a bad year. It was the slow disappearance of the reason to exist.

~ what is left at macsoftgames ~

Destineer closed in May 2011. It did so quietly. No press release went out and no farewell note was posted. The May date survives in secondary accounts instead of in anything the company itself published. Every division went at once, MacSoft and Atomic Games included. Atomic had already lost Konami as the publisher of Six Days in Fallujah in 2009 and had never found a replacement.

macsoftgames.com is still answering, on a WordPress install with a media library dated May 2016. The whole site is a single page: a logo above three sentences in the past tense, with a grid of box covers under them that runs from Age of Empires II to Blue's Clues. Those sentences put the catalog's last year at 2010. Wikipedia dates the company's death to May 2011, when the parent went. Whoever built that page was counting from the last thing MacSoft shipped rather than from the day the paperwork caught up with it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »