Steve Jobs Raged Over Bungie Acquisition

[The Youth Counselor]

I have a hard time believing this because it always seemed to me that Steve Jobs never cared much about video games. He pretty much saw Apple as being for "everything but games" and any that happened to show up were incidental.

Now apparently his attitude is changing somewhat, back back when the whole "Halo" thing was going on I have a hard time believing that he himself really cared all that much or considered his system to have a "premiere game developer".

It always seemed to me that the lack of decent games and game development on the Mac compared to the PC was largely because Mr. Jobs didn't care about games, and the platform just wasn't friendly.

Believe it from a former Mactard, Steve Jobs really cared about the gaming market at that time. In fact one of the major campaigns during his prodigal return as Apple's leader was to bring "Games Back for the Mac."

This is Halo's debut during MacWorld 1998 with an Introduction by Jobs.


The environments were unlike anything I had ever seen at the time. It was the first game I saw with wireframe animations and so much bump mapping. During that time my favorite RTS was probably the Myth series, and I even liked Oni so I was very much excited.

At the time Bungie was very much considered the rare Mac game developer. Indeed Bungie made games for Windows as well, but Mac OS users got their games first and enjoyed many exclusives very much like how VALVe prefers PC gamers and treats them better.

In 2001 Jobs announced that they made an exclusive partnership with nVidia and that the GeForce 3 would premier with future Apple computers. At 2001's MacWorld John Carmack debuted the first demostration of Doom 3 running on the GeForce 3, a game that Mac users were also slated to receive first.


To my untrained eyes at the time that looked like Pixar quality in the low res video. (Pixar of course had a tech demo with Luxo Jr. (the character in their logo) rendered in real time by the next gen Mac with a GeoForce 3 shortly before the Doom 3 demo.)


During that period Jobs made consistent statements trying to convince Windows gamers to convert to Macs for the stability and also the top of the line hardware that they come with. During interviews with Bungie employees they would frequently praise their partnership with Apple and how Apple's investments were keep them afloat.

As a Mac user at the time it was a very hopeful period. I only got Windows 98 to play games such as Half-Life.

But when it became news in 2000 that Bill Gates got his grimy hands around Bungie and was going to make Halo an exclusive game for his entry into the console market: the gargantuan black monstrosity known as the Xbox we were pissed. We called that the great "Halo betrayal."

Of course as a Mac user I later felt more betrayed that Apple's focus became less about making computers and more about making fashion accessories. And breaking their promise to "democratize computers" to instead restrict development to insiders and force users to use only products and accessories approved by them. I've been a Windows user since.