Extreme Fun Pak Pushed Gamers To The Edge (November 25, 2017)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
If you're tied into the Apple ecosystem, then there's a good chance you've encountered a billion ads for discounted iPads and similar products as you navigated the Black Friday holiday salescape this weekend. But if you were to roll back the clock by twenty-one years and put yourselves in the shoes of a Mac customer in 1996, you'd have seen some significantly different products. One of them would have been this official "Apple Quality Bundle" "For Serious Gamers." The Extreme Fun Pak is six different games from the mid '90s. And since it's pretty hard to imagine that Diamonds 3D ever took any hardcore gamers into the realm of intense action, Wing Commander 3 is decidedly the winner of this bunch. It still holds up well today, of course, but we've sure come a long way!

Today I learned Apple published a complication that included Wing Commander 3... with the most 1996 box art ever.






"Extreme Fun Pak." Any of you hard-core gamers up for a challenge? These 6 blockbuster games will take you into the realm of intense action. Just remember to give your kids a chance.

Did anyone get any good Black Friday deals?

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Original update published on November 25, 2017
 
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Hey! You be nice to Diamonds 3D!

Fun fact: My brother wrote Diamonds 3D, my first art job was working on this game!

Also, he later went on to write Escape Velocity, 1995 Mac Shareware Game of the Year!
 
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Oh, but the struggle was real for Mac users in 1996. There were few retail places that sold mac games, and the crossover ports were few and far-between that my PC counterparts were enjoying on their computers. It was either Costco or Egghead Software that consistently carried good Mac titles, especially Egghead. Fry's hadn't come around yet. Once in a while, though, you'd be given a break and a great title would be released for Macintosh. The WCIV Mac version was my first introduction to the series back in 1996.

Bundles like this were often one of the only ways to get Mac ports of mainstream PC games. It was through the "Top 10 Mac Pak II" that I first played WCIII. Unfortunately it was so unstable that I never got past the first dogfight with Thrakkath. I rented the Playstation version to complete the game, and I switched to a PC in 1997. The bundle here doesn't look too bad. I mean, there's Flight Unlimited, as well as Marathon. My 8th grade English teacher was apparently hooked on that.
 
Hey! You be nice to Diamonds 3D!

Fun fact: My brother wrote Diamonds 3D, my first art job was working on this game!

Ha, as I was writing that line, I actually had the thought, "I wonder if anyone who ever worked on this game would ever see this post..."
 
Ha, as I was writing that line, I actually had the thought, "I wonder if anyone who ever worked on this game would ever see this post..."

Apparently the brother of Matt Burch.

Ambrosia Software was probably one of the biggest Mac game developers back in the day - they had some of the slickest Mac games that weren't just simple ports of existing games, at least back then.

I remember playing a ton of Escape Velocity back in the day...
 
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