Classic 'arcade' games for Mac?

benwiggy · Jun 22, 2025

Are there any decent, modern versions of old-school games like Space Invaders, Pacman, Breakout, Zalaga/Defender, etc. ??

E.g. "if someone came up with the idea for the game today."

The same game play, but better graphics. Not emulated versions in a browser (which tend to have worse responsiveness than actual 8-bit hardware); nor whacky reinterpretations, like 3d Pacman.

I used to have "Pac The Man X", which was great, but no longer works, and is abandonware.

Paulyboy · Jun 22, 2025

benwiggy said:
Are there any decent, modern versions of old-school games like Space Invaders, Pacman, Breakout, Zalaga/Defender, etc. ??

E.g. "if someone came up with the idea for the game today."

The same game play, but better graphics. Not emulated versions in a browser (which tend to have worse responsiveness than actual 8-bit hardware); nor whacky reinterpretations, like 3d Pacman.

I used to have "Pac The Man X", which was great, but no longer works, and is abandonware.

Adamvision Studios did a bunch of remakes of classic Atari arcade games that are pretty decent and have Mac support. . However some of them won't even launch on Mac because they are 32 bt applications. This might even be true of all of them. I haven't checked in awhile so don’t know for sure.

But the good news is the Windows versions of the games run perfectly fine in emulation using Crossover. I got most of these games as freebies from the Epic game store and can play the Windows versions of them through the Heroic Launcher paired with Crossover. You could probably get them to work with Parallels Desktop as well. The Heroic game launcher also now has GPTK integration and that may work as well.

Adamvision Studios is also known for making their own little arcade games, like Poosh XL and Ding Dong XL, which are cheap, run on Mac, and I really like. You can check out all their offerings here: