Mac Source Ports

Developer: Chris Sawyer
Release Date: September 2004

Another game from Chris Sawyer, Locomotion served as his spiritual successor to Transport Tycoon and like that game and Rollercoaster Tycoon the game has his signature isometric pixel art style and a hardcore group of followers willing to reimplement and reiterate on it in the form of open source projects. The OpenLoco team recently hammered out the issues necessary for their project to work on 64-bit operating systems so I've made a build of it available here.

  Buy Chris Sawyer's Locomotion on GOG.com

  Buy Chris Sawyer's Locomotion on the Humble Store

Developer: id Software
Release Date: December 2, 1999
Source Code Release Date: August 9, 2005

Quake III Arena is a first-person shooter, the first in the Quake series to focus on multiplayer. The ioquake3 source port has been maintained since the original source code release in 2005, featuring a Universal 2 app that supports Intel 64-bit and Apple Silicon as well as a Universal 1 app that can support Intel and PowerPC Macs going back to Mac OS X 10.3

  Buy Quake III: Arena on GOG.com

  Buy Quake III: Arena on the Humble Store

Developer: New World Computing
Release Date: March 3, 1999

Heroes of Might and Magic III is another 4X turn-based strategy game and is one of the best games in the series.

  Buy Heroes of Might and Magic III on GOG.com

Developer: New World Computing
Release Date: June 1, 2001

Did you like Heroes of Might and Magic III and want more of it? Like a lot more? Good news - between 1999 and 2001 New World Computing put out eight expansion packs under the heading of Heroes Chronicles. Some were retail, others were free, but retailers like GOG have collected them all into one package.

Note that the way VCMI works you will also need the base Heroes of Might and Magic III game installed.

  Buy Heroes Chronicles on GOG.com

Developer: Quetoo Team
Release Date: May 22, 2026

So this is interesting, I just stumbled on this randomly a few weeks back right after it was released, although it was apparently in the works for twenty years.

Quetoo is an open source project that's a combination of id Tech engines and technologies, incorporating every graphics technique the source port communities are known for, and recreating some of the classic maps of the Quake series without actually using any of its data.

The result is a purely community focused freeware arena shooter that can even be edited with modern tools like Trenchboom.
Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Developer: Empires of the Cake
Release Date: May 27, 2026
Source Code Release Date: May 27, 2026

FLESHCANCER is a horor-themed Boomer Shooter from Brazil, published by the same team as BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3. You take the role of someone who seeks to stop the rise of an evil cult that formed in the aftermath of the 1985 fall of the military dictatorship.

The game is currently in Early Access with one of the planned episodes released, and like BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3 uses the Quake engine and features impressive level design.

Developer: PopCap Games
Release Date: May 5, 2009

Plants vs. Zombies is an example of casual game perfection, from developer PopCap Games at their peak, pre-acquisition. Effectively a tower defense game without being a tower defense game, it has a difficulty curve so incredibly well done that at some point you're pulling off elaborate strategies without ever feeling like you're not ready for it. With an addicting amount of depth, additional mini-games once you finish the campaign, and no microtransactions or mismatched mechanics, it's a game that absolutely holds up.

It's also a game where I had no idea there was a modding community, let alone a nearly perfect reverse engineered source port nearly five years in the making. I honestly thought for a minute it was some sort of trick but no, PvZ Portable is a true reverse engineered port.

NOTE: While PvZ-Portable definitely works with Plants vs. Zombies: Game of the Year Edition, I'm not clear if it works with the regular (non-GOTY) edition. As of this writing the GOTY edition is the only version on Steam. As far as I can tell it does not work with the recent Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted edition.

Developer: id Software
Release Date: December 10, 1993
Source Code Release Date: December 23, 1997

You can't *not* have DOOM on a site like this. With its classic and low system requirements, DOOM famously runs on anything with a screen and a processor, so naturally it (still) runs on the Mac. The most active source port is GZDoom, which is ahead of the curve on having a Universal 2 app with M1 Mac support so we're just linking to it here. Be sure to check out their website for more info.

We've also linked to ZDoom, an older but discontinued predecessor to GZDoom, for those of you who want to run DOOM on an older PowerPC Mac.

  Buy DOOM on GOG.com

Developer: id Software
Release Date: October 10, 1994
Source Code Release Date: December 23, 1997

The retail sequel to DOOM eschews episodes for one long campaign of levels. Adding new weapons and monsters, DOOM II delivers on its promise of more DOOM.

  Buy DOOM II on GOG.com

Developer: TeamTNT
Release Date: June 17, 1996
Source Code Release Date: December 23, 1997

Final DOOM was a retail product which contained two 32-level campaigns, TNT: Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment. It used the same weapon and feature set as DOOM II and the episodes were contracted out from the DOOM level editing community.

  Buy Final DOOM on GOG.com