How to play Stagger 1 on Mac

Game summary

Stagger 1 / Red Hawk is a 1997 vertical scrolling shooter arcade game created by Afega. Stagger 1 / Red Hawk was Afega's big breakthrough. Even though its success was mostly expressed in the spreading of bootlegs in China, Afega still claimed to have exported more than 10,000 machines. In Korea, the game was originally published before the summer vacation of 1997, but called back for some reason, and not sold again until November the same year. At first sales were slow because of the low machine price of 250,000 Won (which lead arcade owners assume low quality), but after word-of-mouth had spread, the game became a hit in its home country, too6. While it didn't bring anything new on the shmup table, Red Hawk's biggest strength was its bombastic arsenal, throwing together all kinds of weapon systems that are seen in the genre. Besides the highly upgradeable standard weapon, planes can charge for a devastating, screen filling special attack. Those don't replace smart bombs, though, as those are available, too. Finally, there's a number of sattelites to further boost fire power. All weapons are unique for each of the four different pilots, too. The game originally used an upright monitor, but for some reason some of the European releases swapped the horizontal and vertical resolution around for ordinary display orientation. This makes the game noticably harder, as enemies are seen later. In Japan, the game was distributed as Stagger I (with the upright screen resolution).
First released: Feb 1997

Play Stagger 1 on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Stagger 1 on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Stagger 1 installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Stagger 1 like you would on any PC.
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