About Bloody Time

Game time for Mac
Asher Moses

June 12, 2007

Apple Macs could finally become viable gaming machines after two of the biggest players in the video games industry announced they were embracing the platform.

The move is expected to further drive Mac computer sales, which globally have risen by an average of one million computers a year over each of the last two years.

Most avid gamers have to date steered clear from the Mac, largely due to the relatively meager selection of games available.

At today's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, Electronic Arts (EA), the world's biggest third-party video games publisher, announced it would sell six new games for the Mac this year.

EA co-founder Bing Gordon said the company would in July release Mac versions of Command & Conquer 3, Battlefiled 2142, Need For Speed: Carbon and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Madden NFL 2008 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 would hit stores beginning in August, the same day they are released for Windows.

And id Software, famed for creating the iconic Doom and Quake franchises, announced its new game engine would run on Macs, in addition to the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

The engine, called Tech 5, will form the basis of id Software's next big gaming franchise, which is yet to be named. It will also be licensed to third-party game publishers for use in their own titles.

John Carmack, id Software's co-founder, took the stage at WWDC to demonstrate the new engine for the first time.

"Since many developers at id have made the switch to the Mac for their personal use, we decided it was now time to bring our core game technology to OS X," he said.

id Software's website says Tech 5 will power games containing "vast outdoor landscapes that are completely unique to the horizon, yet have indoor environments with unprecedented artistic detail".

Matthew Powell, editor of Australian Macworld magazine, said today's announcements showed games developers were "embracing" the Mac platform after Apple moved its desktop and laptop computers to an Intel architecture.

He said the move meant games developers needed to do less work to make their code compatible with the Mac.

"In the past, the Mac gaming market has been dominated by ports of Windows games - with few exceptions the major-name developers have built their games for Windows and then licensed code to companies like Aspyr, MacPlay and MacSoft to port to Mac," said Powell.

This meant games often came out on the Mac many months after they were released for Windows.

"This is particularly bad with online games, as by the time the Mac version arrives the Windows players have acquired much more experience," said Powell.

But following today's announcements, Powell said he expected most of the top-selling games on Windows would now be made available for Mac.

Game time for Mac