Apple’s Macintosh commercial aired nationally exactly once, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, and it is still called the greatest television ad ever made. Directed by Ridley Scott a year and a half after Blade Runner, the 60 second film shows a runner in red shorts hurling a sledgehammer through a giant screen where a Big Brother figure lectures rows of gray, shaven drones. It never shows the computer or names a single feature.

This episode tells how close the ad came to never airing. Apple’s board despised it in December 1983, and CEO John Sculley ordered agency Chiat/Day to sell off the Super Bowl time. The agency sold 30 seconds, then claimed it could find no buyer for the remaining 60 without really trying. The story continues through the Orwell estate’s cease and desist letter, decades of parody, and the charge that Apple became the very power it promised to smash.

• To qualify for the 1984 Clio Awards, Chiat/Day quietly aired the spot on station KMVT in Twin Falls, Idaho, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1983.
• Ridley Scott filmed in England and paid London skinheads $25 a day to shave their heads and march as drones. Athlete Anya Major played the runner and David Graham the dictator.
• When Sculley tried to pull the ad, Steve Wozniak offered to pay $400,000 of the $800,000 airtime cost himself, assuming Steve Jobs would cover the other half.
• Apple saw roughly $3.5 million in Macintosh sales almost overnight, and news programs replayed the commercial for free, turning one airing into enormous publicity.
• In 2020 Epic Games released a shot for shot parody alongside its antitrust lawsuit over the App Store, and critic Rebecca Solnit argued in Harper’s in 2014 that the ad ushered in a new kind of oppression.