Those of us who are veterans remember that the Macs of the last century had a decent, if not exclusive catalog of games. Let us remember that the sagas that everyone knows now were born in a opening speech from Apple, although game compatibility on macOS is now a whole other story.
In fact, it is in this story that hides one of those chapters that define the character of Steve Jobs. At a time when Marathon and Halo seemed to have a bright future on the Mac, developers Bungie and Rare were suddenly acquired by Microsoft. And so drove Jobs wild.
The acquisition that could ruin the Mac’s future in gaming
The story was circulating in the media like MCV over a decade ago: Microsoft’s deal with Bungie caught Jobs off guard, and his automatic reaction was to call the Redmond company. Ed Fries, former vice president of video games at Microsoft, remembers that call.
Apparently, Jobs directly called then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, visibly angry, and chastised him for buying the then-leading Mac game developer while keeping his Xbox games. Fries comments that Jobs ‘needed reassurance’ on call. Ballmer himself contacted him to ask him to help calm him down.
The intensity of the discussions that followed this call led to an agreement: Microsoft would help port some of the games developed on macOS, as announced in a opening speech later. “It was a very strange time,” Fries said.
Over the years, that deal hasn’t delivered the results Apple hoped for, and while Macs have their discrete catalog of games, they haven’t achieved what they’ve achieved on Windows. Now Apple wants to relive better days with the Game Porting Toolkit and macOS Sonoma, and I sincerely hope they succeed because they couldn’t have made it easier for game developers.
