It’s hard to imagine Apple approving a game on one of its app platforms that allows the player to pose as Jerry Garcia as he runs around a parking lot to snatch up hits of LSD, needles, and bongs, all while avoiding the police. But back in the mid-1990s, that’s exactly what Apple did—for the Pippin.

For those unfamiliar, the Pippin was a PowerPC-based multimedia platform that looked like a gaming console, though was actually intended for more "general purpose" media use. Still, the device was generally known (and is still remembered as) a gaming console; Japanese company Bandai was the only company to license the platform when it was created in 1994.

Back then, the careful curation of “appropriate” games wasn’t at the top of Apple’s priority list—Steve Jobs had just returned to the struggling company and was trying desperately to make the right cuts to keep everything afloat. The Pippin would eventually get the axe as well, but there was a brief time in which independent developers could create games for the platform, and a hobbyist going by the username “MenuBar” was up for the challenge.

MenuBar, a man named Jason Rainbows, recounted a tangential story about the origin of his username—one that highlights how different communicating with Apple was back in 1997 or so, after his game was released and Steve Jobs had returned to the company. “Back then, if I called Apple and stayed on the phone (or bitched long enough), I’d eventually get Steve Jobs or The Woz on the line,” Rainbows told Ars. “One conversation I had with Steve Jobs—I forget what I was trying to do, probably some modification of the desktop or something—I remembered him saying to me ‘I don’t care what you do, just don’t fuck with the menubar and you’ll be all right.’ So I started using the name ‘MenuBar’ on our BBS as an inside joke that nobody else but me gets.”

Rainbows mentions desktop modifications because his game, Garcia’s Guitars, originally started out on the Mac when he wrote it around 1995. “I made Garcia’s Guitars as freeware back in System 7. It was a very simple game I made as a learning experience,” Rainbows said. At the time, he was working as a production manager and art director at a “busy magazine production company,” and had only just received access to his first Macintosh computer through his work.

“I worked 90 hours a week so that I could afford one of my own, to learn on at home,” Rainbows said.

And learn at home he did, with the help of his BBS friends and a handful of Apple engineers who had taken an interest in his game. "I suppose the game got passed around Cupertino a bit,” Rainbows said. “I eventually became good friends with a few folks who worked at Apple, who could advise me on neat stuff that was possible with this new emergent technology [the Pippin]."

Rainbows bought a book about creating games for the Mac, creating Garcia's Guitars as a simple way to learn the fundamentals. According to a description of the game on Macintosh Garden, the game is "like Crystal Quest with the theme of late '60s psychedelia." Another description for the Garcia's Guitars 1.2 update posted on March 6, 1997 at Associate.com really drives home the point of the game:

Jerry's back from Rock'nRoll Heaven. There's a shortage of electric guitars up there. So, like, he's gotta come down and hug as many guitars as possible that are flying around in this wierd stadium parking lot. But the cops don't wanna allow this kinda behavior so they're gonna try to bust him. Just because he's comin' down doesn't mean he's gotta come DOWN, man. So there's goodies to keep Captain Trips high. Get higher Kharma Points! Bigger Bogus Points! Go from Cloud 9 to however high you can get! This is an upgrade from Garcia's Guitars 1.0 I fixed the "Stoned/Normal" mode (it works now, heh) and I made it confusing at the same time! I also "cleaned up" the alert prompts. Hoo-boy, did I catch he... ...heck for that! But never fear, I didn't clean them up THAT MUCH. So there. No more Amphetimine Speed mode. It resulted in "Nervous- Mouse Syndrome" and was banned in several college towns. Besides, nobody could get past Cloud 9. Eliminated the Brown Acid preferences. Nobody liked these anyways. Made the game no fun at-all. Go figure, eh? Hope you can dig this game and, if you run into Jerry before I do, tell him I said Hey Now!

For a game that was temporarily "banned in several college towns," it's impressive that Apple not only didn't care about the content of Garcia's Guitars, the company actually highlighted it by packaging it with the Pippin. In fact, because the Pippin itself ran a version of System 7 (according to Wikipedia, System 7.5.2), Rainbows didn't have to actually make any changes to his Mac game in order to port it to Apple's new gaming console—and if Apple made any changes, he wasn't aware of them.

"I have no idea about the tech aspects, or what they may have done to make it work on Pippin," he told Ars. "My guess was that they just picked a bunch of freeware titles that worked on Pippin. I received the CD in the mail one day with a badly translated (Japanese) letter saying it was now included [with the device]."

Alas, while Rainbows' dream was to eventually make money as a developer, he eventually became disillusioned with working with Apple.

"I had about a dozen games, utilities, icon collections, toys, etc., in public release. The personal challenge was to see if I could make a living sharing my work," Rainbows recalled. "Turned out I couldn't." Following Jobs' return to Apple, Rainbows had begun working on an ambitious Myst-style game in Hypercard that made use of QuickTime panoramas and hotspots, all thanks to a promise from Jobs that "QuickTime was going to become a sort of universal operating system, running programs inside of it and such," according to Rainbows.

That obviously never happened. "I was very excited and learned everything I could about QuickTime. It took me about a year of work to realize I was stuck in Jobs' 'reality distortion field,'" he said.

Rainbows—who now works in the printing and publishing industry, and spends his free time volunteering with charities to promote collaborative live music in virtual worlds—explained that he has always wanted a more robust, three-dimensional computing experience, and modern computers just can't meet those standards.

"Even as far back in the one-bit days of the first Macs, I envisioned that the Mac desktop should ideally be a 3D environment where we could walk around and explore, a place where collaborative work and long-distance meetings take place in a virtual realm. Icons were a nice visual representation at the time, but even with all my past work designing icons, I felt that pictographic icons were not ideal representations of real-life concepts," he told Ars. "It saddens me that we haven't progressed much further than this anachronistic and unintuitive method."

Despite feeling jaded about the modern state of computers, Rainbows still looks back on his experience with System 7 and the Pippin fondly. He recounted another story about meeting someone in Germany who had played Garcia's Guitars back in the day and wrote him some fan mail, resulting in more than a decade of communications. "I've never made a penny on the game, but at least I got one lifelong friend out of it."