GAME ON FOR APPLE?

Apple is making more of an effort to court gamers, but will it prove to be successful?

- WRITTEN BY DAVID CROOKES

VIDEO GAMES ARE a serious business. The worldwide gaming market, according to Statista, is estimated at close to $455 billion, and games generate significantly more revenue than the movie and music industries combined. Apple has a slice of this market. It's said that around 2 billion people play games on mobile phones, with iOS understood to be generating more than $47.7 billion, compared to Android's $33.3 billion. Yet, despite games helping to boost Apple's coffers today, the company isn't generally regarded to be a gaming powerhouse. Apple's flirtations with games began before the company was even formed.

Its co-founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, began their tech careers in the video game industry, working at Atari in 1976 on the circuit board for Breakout. Apple's early computers also attracted many game developers — Richard Garriott wrote Akalabeth: World of Doom entirely in Applesoft’s BASIC and Jordan Mechner experimented with rotoscoping (animation/visual effects) to produce Karateka, both for Apple II.

“The Apple IIGS was seen as a very cool home computer that could play games, and it was a “must-have” when it came to game platforms,” games designer and programmer Graeme Devine tells Mac Life. But then the Mac arrived. “The Mac initially had a black-and-white display, and although that quickly disappeared, it meant games were harder to port to that platform. I think a lot of developers stopped looking at the Mac at that point and never looked back.”

That's not to say the games dried up or that Apple abandoned the market. Bungie, creator of Myth, made its name developing top-quality titles for the Mac, and Apple even experimented with a game console, the ill-fated Pippin, in 1996. “Apple also courted developers hard in the 1990s,” Devine adds. “When I was at id Software, we got a lot of help to make Quake III work really well in Mac OS X.