Peng

Released in 1999 by Matt Segur (msegur@nwu.edu) and distributed through the Info-Mac archive as peng-10.hqx, Peng! 1.0 is a fast-paced two-player 3D action game for Power Macintosh. The author frames it, half tongue-in-cheek, as the eternal battle between good and evil — light and dark, Leon Trotsky and Henry Rollins.

Gameplay

Peng! is built strictly around two-player local competition; there is no single-player mode. Both players share a Power Mac and engage in fast 3D action combat, with the entire design oriented around head-to-head sessions rather than score chasing or solo progression.

Engine and technical changes

System requirements call for a Power Macintosh, two players, a 16-bit-capable video system, a 640x480 or larger monitor, 5 MB of disk space, and 6 MB of available RAM — modest by 1999 standards but firmly PowerPC-only, which excludes the lingering 68k Mac install base. The 3D action focus and PPC requirement put it in the wave of late-90s shareware that finally took advantage of native PowerPC performance.

Development and release

Distributed as a single ~4.9 MB BinHex archive on Info-Mac in August 1999, Peng! is a classic one-author Mac shareware release. Documentation beyond the Info-Mac abstract is essentially non-existent; the game survives in vintage Mac shareware compilations on the Internet Archive and on the Funet Info-Mac mirror.