Mac System Software (included games)

At launch, two days after Ridley Scott's 1984 commercial, the Apple Macintosh hit the store with a bold plan to present itself as a business machine to rival anything IBM had for the home consumer. To distance itself from the seemingly disposable home video game units tarred in the North American video game crash of 1983, the machine's marketing division avoided appearing concerned for its gaming potential, maintaining distance even between in-house efforts like Through The Looking Glass. Nonetheless, two games were included among the Macintosh operating system at launch: First, there was the multitaskable Puzzle desk accessory, a sliding-tile game with its tiles numbered rather than patterned with images. (Puzzle remained with Macs until it was replaced with Jigsaw* in 1994 with Mac OS 7.5, and a similar game is included in the OS X Macs of today.)

• Second was AMAZING, bundled with the "Guided Tour of Macintosh" diskette (and audiocassette!) included with the computer (and, curiously, also with distributions of Through The Looking Glass). As its name suggests, it's a maze game where the player uses the mouse to trace a path connecting two points, a square and a circle, within a maze. Mazes of multiple difficulty levels are included.