Mac gaming refers to the use of video games on Macintosh personal computers. In the 1990s, Apple computers did not attract the same level of video game development as Microsoft Windows computers due to the high popularity of Windows and, for 3D gaming, Microsoft's DirectX technology. In recent years, the introduction of Mac OS X and support for Intel processors has eased the porting of many games, including 3D games through use of OpenGL, and more recently, Apple's own Metal API API. Virtualization technology and the Boot Camp dual-boot utility also permit the use of Windows and its games on Macintosh computers. Today, a growing number of popular games run natively on macOS, though as of early 2019^[update], a majority still require the use of Microsoft Windows.

macOS Catalina (and later) eliminated support for 32-bit games, including those compatible with older versions of macOS.

Prior to the release of the Macintosh 128K, the first Macintosh computer, marketing executives at Apple feared that including a game in the finished operating system would aggravate the impression that the graphical user interface made the Mac toy-like. Also, the limited amount of RAM in the 128K meant that fitting a game into the operating system would be very difficult. Eventually, Andy Hertzfeld created a Desk Accessory called Puzzle that occupied only 600 bytes of memory, was deemed small enough to be safely included in the operating system, and was shipped with the Mac when released in 1984. With Puzzle, the first computer game designed specifically for a mouse, the Macintosh became the first computer with a game in its ROM. Puzzle would remain a part of the Mac OS for the next ten years, until being replaced with Jigsaw, a jigsaw puzzle game included as part of System 7.5.

During the development of the Mac, a chess game similar to Archon based on Alice in Wonderland was shown [1] to the development team. The game was written by Steve Capps for the Apple Lisa computer, but could be easily ported to the Macintosh. The completed game was shown at the Mac's launch and released a few months later under the title Through the Looking Glass, but Apple failed to put much marketing effort into ensuring its success and the game was not a top seller.

By the mid-1980s most computer companies avoided the term "home computer" because of its association with the image of, as Compute! wrote, "a low-powered, low-end machine primarily suited for playing games". Apple's John Sculley, for example, denied that his company sold home computers; rather, he said, Apple sold "computers for use in the home". In 1990 the company reportedly refused to support joysticks on its low-cost Macintosh LC and IIsi computers to prevent customers from considering them as "game machine"s. Apart from a developer discount on Apple hardware, support for games developers was minimal. Game development on the Macintosh nonetheless continued, with titles such as Dark Castle (1986), Microsoft Flight Simulator (1986) and SimCity (1989), though mostly games for the Mac were developed alongside those for other platforms. Notable exceptions were Myst (1993), developed on the Mac (in part using HyperCard) and only afterwards ported to Windows, Pathways into Darkness, which spawned the Halo franchise, The Journeyman Project, Lunicus, Spaceship Warlock, and Jump Raven. As Apple was the first manufacturer to ship CD-ROM drives as standard equipment (on the Macintosh IIvx and later Centris models), many of the early CD-ROM based games were initially developed for the Mac, especially in an era of often confusing Multimedia PC standards. In 1996 Next Generation reported that, while there had been Mac-only games and PC ports with major enhancements on Macintosh, "until recently, most games available for the Mac were more or less identical ports of PC titles".

The Apple Pippin (also known as the Bandai Pippin) was a multimedia player based on the Power Mac that ran a cut-down version of the Mac OS designed, among other things, to play games. Sold between 1996 and 1998 in Japan and the United States, it was not a commercial success, with fewer than 42,000 units sold and fewer than a thousand games and software applications supported.

The co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, disliked video games, but Apple has at times attempted to market the platform for gaming. In 1996, the company released a series of game-enabling APIs called Game Sprockets. In April 1999, Jobs gave an interview with the UK-based Arcade magazine to promote the PowerPC G3-based computers Apple were selling with then new ATI Rage 128 graphics cards, and describing how Apple was "trying to build the best gaming platform in the world so developers are attracted to write for it" and "trying to leapfrog the PC industry".

A 2007 interview with Valve's Gabe Newell included the question of why his company was keeping their games and gaming technology "a strictly Windows project". Newell answered: