On July 21, 1999, Steve Jobs stood on stage in front of a packed Macworld Expo New York audience and announced a video game that would go on to influence the entire games industry and turn Apple into a gaming powerhouse.
Half of that promise turned out to be true. The first-person shooter that Jobs revealed
didchange the course of video game history — but not for Apple. Instead,
Microsoft purchased the game’s developer a year later, snatching up the title for the launch of the
original Xbox in 2001.
The
game Microsoft “stole” from Jobs and Apple was called
Halo: Combat Evolved, and the developer was Bungie, a pioneering game studio for the Mac. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
In an alternate universe, Apple never lost
Halo to its long-time tech nemesis, the Xbox never became a gaming juggernaut because it didn’t have Master Chief, and the Mac — not PC — went on to become the biggest non-console platform for blockbuster games.
No doubt “losing” in gaming for decades has not been fun for Apple. It’s certainly painful and disappointing for Mac users both new and old, who have to buy a separate PC or console to play AAA games. But in 2023, the winds of change began to blow.
With a lineup of Mac hardware that can finally go toe to toe with some of the best PCs (gaming-specific or not), year-over-year improvements to Apple silicon that push performance higher and higher, and more gaming-focused software optimizations for developers and users, Apple is not looking to repeat history again.
Apple has deployed its teams on the map with capable weapons and plenty of reloads. Now, all it needs to do is capture the flag. Easier said than done, but not impossible for a company valued at nearly $3 trillion and used to playing the long game.
“We've got Mac-specific features that you don't find on every other system like our displays, our speaker systems,” Gordon Keppel, a Mac product marketing manager, tells
Inverse. “So when I'm sitting in front of a system that is performant, it looks great, it sounds great, it doesn't get incredibly hot — that is a great gaming experience!”
fuck off...
