@jesse To me, a lot of the problem seems to be that today's UI designers and programmers take little heed — if they're even aware — of the human interface guidelines Apple's Mac team wrote back in the mid-80s (or the underlying principles thereof). Too often they're chasing trends, giving themselves busywork, or optimising purely on data and stats, rather than following a principal that computers/software should be both fun and functional.

@jesse She was such a treasure for the Mac team to have. What a wonderful thought it was that a computer OS could smile and say its own version of hello every time you turn it on, and to have a mascot that says "moof", and all those other delightful touches of whimsy and fun that she added.

Let's look at another Classic-era black-and-white Mac game icon. This one's from Bill Appleton's World Builder game-making tool (made in 1984, released in '85), which let you create your own adventure/RPG hybrids (or pure point-and-click adventures, if you had the patience to create all the hotspots). He himself made the commercial game Enchanted Scepters with it, but there were several popular shareware titles by other authors.

Anyway, what I love here is how the icon takes the design language of the Mac's own UI — that a hand with a pen or brush indicates an app used for creativity — and extends it to a third-party application meant for making media-rich Mac games. And the fact that it looks like the hand is marking out the world just perfectly fits both the name and the function of the software — the World Builder is used to build virtual worlds. I think it's a neat collision of ideas. #macicons

@yrochat I do and I do not. That sounds cryptic, I know, but what I mean is that I've seen that kind of stuff on a number of old compilation CDs and users group floppy/CD collections, but I can't tell you which ones. Possibly some came from clip art libraries as well.

@vga256 Yes, I was made painfully aware of the fact that some people hated those margins and told Sam at Bitmap that it was priority number one to shift them inwards. Now it looks like this on text pages:

But I recently yesterday that I've never actually talked about Classic-era Mac icons on social media before, so I wanted to pay tribute to my favourite black-and-white Mac game icons. I'll take a leaf out of @winicons' book and show them at three sizes — given their tiny size, let's go original 32x32, 4x size at 128x128, and 6x size at 512x512. Let's start with my favourite Mac game, Glider, then I'll do one more a bit later today and others through the rest of December. Will use #macicons as a tag.

Glider was often called the quintessential Mac game, and for good reason — it hard charm, whimsy, quirkiness, and a friendly, open sense of discoverability about it. And creator John Calhoun managed to squeeze it down to 32 pixels by taking his paper plane sprite, a heating vent (used in the game to provide lift, so that the plane can return to the top of the screen for a fresh descent), and some dots to visualise the air currents — everything you need to know about how the game works. Plus it looks fantastic.

@lunarloony Yeah, I love her work and her thoughts on computing/interaction design, and I really dislike the direction that modern UIs went in. So many things are needlessly difficult or unintuitive now, and certainly there's less of a feeling of whimsy and discoverability about the way they look and work.

But what about games? How can you convey the richness of a game's world and/or its characters in such a limited form? The best b/w Mac game icons had a magic to them that stuck with me throughout my childhood and into my work in games and tech media. So it was important to me when Bitmap Books came calling about publishing an Expanded Edition of The Secret History of Mac Gaming that we put in my most-wanted missing feature from the first edition: an icon gallery (with both colour and b/w icons across the whole Classic era).

I'm a big fan of icons from the black-and-white Mac era. There's something so compelling about that question of how do you distil the essence of this app/game/function into a 32x32 pixel square using only black dots on a transparent white background? Susan Kare from the Mac team was especially great at this; her icons for Mac system apps are just phenomenal.

My brother and his wife run the Creative Power Award, a US$2000/AU$3000 grant and group mentorship for emerging US or Australia-based creators working at the intersection of art and social justice. The 2023 edition is open for applications until January 5th, so get to it if you're working part-time, freelance, or spare time on something special that could have real impact. https://www.creativepoweraward.org

@Zodypop Agreed on both counts. It'd be a huge task to try to finish it and sort out all the loose ends, though.

Still got the manual and Mac reference card inside, too. It's in a really nice font and there's even a partially-drawn map inside that you can finish as you explore the world.

Turns out I still have the Alternate Reality: The City Mac box (though the disks are long gone).

The first game I ever played — a story I've told numerous times before — is now finally preserved properly and playable in a web browser, after years of working only partially and only in MESS/MAME (or on a real b/w Mac). This is the 1987 Mac port of Alternate Reality: The City, an ambitious, fascinating, and innovative open-world RPG first released on Atari 800 in 1985. https://archive.org/details/moofaday_Alternate_Reality_The_City

@a2_4am Watching my brother play the Mac port of Alternate Reality is one of my very earliest memories. But I shudder to think now how we reformatted and overwrote the floppy around the late 90s when I put the disk in and the computer said it was empty. Wonderful news to see it preserved properly at last.

@MichaelKlamerus @dosnostalgic Having interviewed and corresponded with the man, and done an entire book on the shareware era, these documents he's sharing are gold but take all his stories with a grain of salt unless they're backed by verifiable data. I've never found him lying — just glossing over (or choosing to forget?) negative details or taking a little more credit than he deserves.

@dosgameclub Also of possible interest to you and others playing along, here's what I wrote / found out about One Must Fall 2097's history for my book Shareware Heroes. And there's an excellent fansite with lots of additional info about the game at http://omfuniverse.tk/

@DanNess 1991 for that one, actually. The other post was '94 and asks people to send an email. But yeah, different world. (And yet, remarkably, so much of the business of games is the same.)