MacPipes
What is it?
What's the Story? (Morning Glory)
The first public release of this game was numbered 2.0. It sounds a bit strange, doesn't it?
Well, in fact this game has a long story behind its back.
Despite its appeal and gameplay, it is NOT a clone of Pipe Dream from LucasArts Games; it is in fact a rendition of a small Amiga game I saw in the late 80s, called Pipeline. It was so addictive that I decided to port it to my Mac (it was a Macintosh SE, one of those small machines with a black & white built-in screen, do you remember?) I started programming it in Turbo Pascal in 1988 (I still have that proto-version floating around somewhere on my hard disk). Then the 90s arrived bringing color to the Macs. In early 1994 I produced a color version of MacPipes but never released it to the public. Until today (oh, by the way, the silly name it's because all Macintosh programs in the 80s were called MacThis, MacThat, MacSomething).
Pipeline, as far as I could find out, was actually the precursor of Pipe Dream itself. John Dale and Spiny Norman were the founders of The Assembly Line. And of course Pipe Dream is not a LucasArts game; LucasArts just ported it to several platforms, including the Mac, and distributed it in the US.
The only difference in gameplay between MacPipes and Pipe Dream I could detect is that as soon as the juices start flowing, you cannot lay pipes any more. Not really an improvement.
It's a pity that Federico Filipponi never released the original black & white version of the game. But it's a very good game for 12" screens and Color Classics. There is now a version that runs on OS X, but it seems rather pointless to play it on a large monitor.
| Pipe Mania Variants | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pipe Dream |  |
90 | Scott Thomson | |||
| Oilcap |  |
91 |  |
William Soleau | ||
| Pornpipe | |
93 |  |
|||
| EmPipe | |
 |
Yutaka Emura | |||
| Pipeline | |
 |
||||
| WOWSpill | |
|
Ben C. Pullen | |||
| MacPipes |  |
95 | |
|||
