Last year at this time, I took the opportunity at the end of Marchintosh to write a post about one of my favorite old Mac games, Realmz, and I'd figure I'd do similarly today. This one isn't really classic-Mac related, but there's a tenuous connection: Blizzard was, for a while, one of the best major game makers in terms of porting their games to the Mac.

The Tenuous Connection

In the 90s, gaming on the Mac was largely its own thing, for both general cultural reasons (Mac users loved these weird little shareware games) and market ones (it was an even smaller target market than today). In general, a popular game on DOS or Windows had little chance of showing up on the Mac. There were companies like Aspyr that specialized in porting games over to the Mac, and sometimes these ended up really nicely. I remember that the port of Doom got a nice resolution upgrade for its delay. It was pretty rare, though, that a company would keep step themselves.

For this era, Blizzard was surprisingly good about this. Warcraft 1 came out in late 1994 and had its Mac version come out only about a year and a half later. Warcraft 2, Diablo, and StarCraft kept a similar cadence, with the Mac port coming out a year-ish after the first release.

Beyond porting the games, Blizzard pulled this classy move:

Once the Mac port came out, they started including it on the same discs as the Windows one, which was particularly useful for households like ours that had a split of platforms.

By the time they got to Diablo 2, the window had narrowed down to a month, and so their games started effectively coming out on both platforms at the same time. Blizzard also did a solid job of keeping pace with Apple's various platform shifts, adding OS X compatibility to their games from the era around when that OS came out. That's something that continues in World of Warcraft to this day: WoW has followed the Mac from 32-bit PowerPC, to 32-bit x86, to x64-64, and now to ARM, all basically right as the transitions happened, putting other game makers (and enterprise-software vendors) to shame.

Sadly, we're in a backslide period with this, but that's not important now. The point today, to get finally back to it, is one of my favorite memories from the original versions of WoW.

Early World of Warcraft

Though I had imagined I resisted the siren song of WoW for a long time, I remember that Maraudon had recently come out when I started and that Captain Placeholder was there, meaning that I caved somewhere between January 21 and March 7, 2005. My first long-lasting character was a Night Elf Hunter (of course), and I ended up in an all-Hunter guild. If you know anything about WoW, you can immediately see that, as thematic as the Nesingwary Safari Co. was, it was not really practical as a proper guild.

Eventually, I found that my boss also played WoW, so we picked a server to set up shop Horde-side. Correctly, I started a Troll Hunter who lives to this day, and in whose image my Classic adventures pretty much always start. He's also the guy who first experienced the quest line that I'm thinking of today.

Vanilla WoW's Quest Chains

As WoW's expansions have rolled out over the decades (!), their questing storylines have gotten pretty focused. Each zone will have its own story, and there will be side quests that are their own thing, but everything feels very intentional and coordinated. Each zone's plot informs the others, and the themes of the expansion are (for better and worse) pretty consistent.

Vanilla WoW, for a lot of reasons, didn't really work like that. Because it was comparatively early in the history of MMOs and because the people working on it didn't have it down to a science yet, things were more scattershot in a way that has a lot of charm. Some quests (especially in the early Human zones) are clearly the designers wanting to put classic D&D/RPG tropes into their new game - and those zones are also filled with little touches that betrayed that they spent more work there than in most places.

This continued through all of the zones in the game, which varied wildly in their focus. A lot of them were following up on threads from Warcraft 3: the Night Elves coming out of seclusion, the Horde scraping out a home in Durotar and The Barrens, the Forsaken waking in the ruins of their plagued homelands. Others, like the Human and Dwarf areas, picked up on threads from Warcraft 1, and also established their own new lore.

It's in those Human and Dwarf zones where you get one of the few long-form quest chains that vanilla WoW had to offer. The early zones offered an uncharacteristically-tight story that was (spoilers, I guess) picked up at max level when you delve into Blackrock Depths and eventually fight Onyxia.

The Silithids

Though less heralded (reasonably), the Horde had something sort of like this, but it wasn't as fleshed out. Presumably, this was both because it didn't need to be and because its crescendo didn't happen until a year and a half after launch. This is the one I want to talk about today, because I've always really liked how subtly it was woven into the zones that a young Orc, Tauren, or Troll was likely to quest through.

It starts pretty early, in the Crossroads. When you hit level 17, you'll be offered this quest by a Troll named Korran:

It's pretty innocuous, especially when included in the torrent of quests you get around that point. It's also way down in the southern half of the Barrens, which took freaking forever to walk to, so you were likely to leave it languishing in your quest log for a while. And the quest itself is not particularly special: you go down there, click on the clickable items until you have enough eggs, and then head back north. Mostly of note is that you fought the nasty Silithid Swarmers, who were unusual for early-level enemies in that they kept a bunch of annoying adds with them. This was a clever way for the game mechanics to subtly reinforce the story.

Then, as was vanilla's way, things quieted down for a while. It's not until 10 levels later, when you're going to embark to the Thousand Needles, that Korran follows up with another quest, where his boss shares his growing concern:

So far, these are the only two people talking about these insects (unless you're a Warrior) - all of your other quests are about local threats like the centaur, harpies, and so forth. Hints start dropping more once you're in the Thousand Needles, though. A Tauren named Hagar Lightninghoof gives you a quest to find a reported "alien egg":

Then, as you're following up in the "The Swarm Grows" questline, you're sent to an abandoned Dwarven dig site in the southern Shimmering Flats. It's quickly obvious why it was abandoned:

There may have been some odd outcroppings when you dug up eggs in The Barrens, but this is a different scale entirely, a cave with oddly-organic protrusions in what's otherwise just a dig site in a salt flat. Things don't get any friendlier when you enter the cave:

Still, while ominous and a bit gross, you hand in your bug parts and go about your day. Before too long, you'll make your way south to the neutral Goblin town of Gadgetzan, where you do all sorts of odd jobs for the locals. One - checking on the water supply to see if the local bandits are interfering - ends up with a surprise encounter with some more Silithid:

There are some more encounters with the insects in Tanaris - including some horrifying lairs - and things start to pick up. That quest kicked off an eight-level-spanning chain that will eventually take you to the neighboring Un'goro Crater. You're also likely, around this time, to take a trip northwest to the verdant Feralas for a few levels. While a lot of the quests there revolve around the local gnoll and ogre populations, our invasive "friends" pop up again in the south of the zone (a recurring theme):

You find similar hives in Un'goro Crater, and a clear pattern emerges: the further south and west you go, the more numerous and powerful these creatures become, and it is obvious that the small nest you found in the Barrens wasn't a fluke. The nightmarish depth of the problem becomes obvious when you, at about the level cap, finally arrive in the subtly-named zone Silithus:

Ah, right, well then. You've grown in power alongside the Silithid you've found, but the ones here are much more powerful still.

As a neat meta-game note, the progression of this quest chain played out in the release process of the game. While major patches to the game's expansions almost always served specifically to advance the lore, vanilla was less consistent. Until the last few, most of the major patches were filling in things that were, from the perspective of the game's lore, always there. They'd rise to prominence because of some new focus, but presumably one could have in-universe gone to Maraudon or Dire Maul and found the same stuff before it was actually implemented in the game.

Silithus was a bit different, largely due to its original release state and its phased reconstruction. It originally consisted of basically a tiny camp with a flight point at the entrance and then a bunch of hives and cultists. Patch 1.8.0 brought a new quest hub and some actual story to the pieces, and it felt in lore that it wasn't just an implementation of something already there: the Silithid and the cultists supporting them were on the move. This came to full fruition in the next major patch, which added the raids and the most globally-immersive world event they've ever done.

The World

With that world event, every character - from the lowest levels to the peak raiders - had some part to play in the war effort. Something that started out as just a few leveling quests for baby Horde characters here ended up being something of global importance. And, with the pace of leveling in vanilla WoW, a player would likely be spending physical months having this doled out to them, so slowly that it didn't even really feel like a consistent tale the first time I went through it. But it is consistent, and in a way that feels unlike anything the game is set up to do now.

While I still enjoy current WoW, this is the sort of thing that makes me miss the vanilla days (even beyond the usual rose-colored glasses). The general unpolished feeling of this and other parts made the world feel a bit more real, and the fact that vanilla covered way more space and storylines than any expansion does meant that there was room for thin but long-form quest chains like this.

Fortunately, the prevalence of Classic realms means that it's mostly there to be played through now. It's lost the meta-game mechanical touch of the progressive rollout of patches, but the lower-level quests are all there and it'll still take you a long time in between them. If it's been a while for you, maybe roll up a Horde character in Classic and give it a shot. The last time I leveled (to get these screenshots), I was prepared to find these breadcrumbs and was delighted each time I saw one.

And, unlike the Alliance's precious The Missing Diplomat, this one has a worthwhile conclusion.

For a while now, I've wanted to just kind of gush about an old Mac game I played when I was a teenager, and the last day of Marchintosh for the year is as good a time as any.

Overview

Realmz is a game that ran on the classic Mac OS and, in later versions, Windows. It was shareware at the time - one of the few shareware games I ended up cobbling together the money for - but has long been made fully available for free, with my go-to source being the Macintosh Garden. If you have SheepShaver around, it works nicely there.

The game itself is quickly identified as a party-based fantasy RPG. I didn't really realize it at the time, but it's a full-on CRPG in the nerdiest sense. I mean, look at this freaking character sheet:

While it's not strictly D&D rules, it basically is. Older versions (which are also available on the Macintosh Garden) even used THAC0 before switching to an "Armor Rating" system.

CRPG

Looking back, I'm glad I had an experience with such a true-blood CRPG at the time. I didn't play D&D growing up, didn't play the Gold Box games, and was too busy playing pretty much exclusively Blizzard games to play the Infinity Engine games or Neverwinter Nights when they came out. It wasn't really until Dragon Age: Origins and then (especially) Pillars of Eternity that I realized the glory of the genre. But looking at Realmz, it's obvious that it's right in the same lineage.

Combat is strictly turn-based, takes place on a grid, and is suitably technical:

It even does some of the weird stuff: for example, martial characters won't just get multiple attacks per round, but will also get "partial" steps like my rogue Hebs there, who gets three attacks every two rounds, as a stepping stone to 2 / 1.

Realmz also has its own mechanics-heavy take on the thing CRPGs try to do where they want to emulate an open-ended experience a DM might oversee beyond just combat. For example, early on, you meet a kid who wants you to help his dog, which is stuck in a well. When you get there, you're presented with the "encounter" screen, where you can try all sorts of things:

There are a lot of ways to deal with these encounters. In this case, I might have Galba there do an Acrobatic Act, which has about even odds. My sorcerer Fenton there might use a Spider Climb (might not be the name) spell to make scaling the well effortless. Or, if I stocked up, I might just use a rope. You can easily fail this - if you do, the kid runs off crying and you have to wait for the guards to show up to help you, with no experience gain. Realmz has a bunch of these scenarios and they're pretty neat. Admittedly, they fall short in the ways that all non-DM-run games eventually do, where your actual options aren't truly limitless. The "Speak" option is available in other situations, but it's only ever really practical if you have, say, a magic word to open a door or something. It's not a true tabletop experience, but it's trying, bless its heart.

Mac-ness

One thing I really enjoy about games in the heyday of Mac shareware games (by the way, read The Secret History of Mac Gaming if you haven't - it's great) is how thoroughly Mac-like they are. For both practical and cultural reasons, a lot of Mac games didn't necessarily take over the whole screen with their own interface like DOS and Windows games usually do. While there are some Windows games that use the Windows UI, like another small classic Castle of the Winds, it's very common in Mac games. For example, there's Scarab of Ra:

As it happens, Scarab of Ra is another game where I didn't appreciate its lineage at the time: it's a true roguelike, albeit with a first-person perspective.

Realmz doesn't go quite as hard in using native widgets for everything, but you can see the menu bar in earlier screenshots - you use the normal Mac menu to access game commands, the bestiary, your ally list, your collected notes, and so forth. It's just neat. Also, like a lot of Mac software at the time, Realmz's program directory is just a delight to look at:

My use of the "Drawing Board" Appearance Manager theme helps it too, but just check out those icons. That sort of thing wasn't strictly necessary, but it was the Mac way, and it was wonderful.

Versions

And this isn't exactly a Mac-like attribute, but I like that Realmz wasn't afraid of using version numbers. It went from version 1.x all the way up through 8.x, with minor and patch versions along the way. It was updated all the time, and it was always exciting to see a new major version to find what the big changes are.

Mostly, the changes were things like adding classes: the old versions have the same sort of handful you'd find in basic D&D, while the later ones have so many that you can pick between "Archer" and "Marksman" or "Bard" and "Minstrel". Some of the changes were less like finding a D&D source book and more like the game gradually morphing into its own sequel, though.

For example, the original versions didn't have music of any kind, as was the style at the time. Somewhere along the line (version 5, I think), it gained music, and... boy, it's a doozy. Here's, for example, the camping music:

What I assume happened is that the developer wanted to add some music and then found some free or cheap module files and slapped them in there where they kind of work. The tone is absolutely bizarre, and it's kind of great for it.

It was just neat seeing the game progress, with the changes in systems and new features, even the "eh, not the best idea" stuff like parts of dungeons that switch to a first-person mode.

Scenarios

I have to admit that, though I played a ton of Realmz, I never even got that far into it. A big part of that was that the scenarios beyond the starting City of Bywater also cost money above the core game, and it's a tall order for a cash-strapped teenager to cough up money at all, let alone add-on costs. So my characters probably always plateaued around level 10, as there's just not that much to do in the base scenario. That's good news for future me, though: there's a ton of stuff waiting for me whenever I want to get back into it.

If you have a taste for older games or CRPGs in general, I definitely suggest you give it a try. The Windows version may be easier to run than the Mac one, though it loses some of the appeal. Depending on your temperament, Realmz may be easier to get into from scratch than games like, say, the original Baldur's Gate, with the latter's janky RTwP combat and constant fourth-wall-breaking dweebiness. Definitely keep it in mind for a cozy-day game, I say.