It seems incredible that just 11 years ago, Steve Jobs could announce a video game in the middle of a Macworld Expo as a big news. But there is an explanation, Mac was a platform with few video games. In part, it is the fault of the PPC Processors, which complicated the PC to Mac Ports. Today there has been a lot of improvement in this aspect, with Steam releasing games for Mac almost weekly, and many games in stores already coming with the installer for both platforms.
But letâs focus our attention on the video game that Steve Jobs announced at said conference as a great novelty for Mac. Halo, a game developed by Bungie, with a design very similar to the one that came out later on Xbox, the same music, and practically the same ships. But how could this happen? and most importantly, how could Steve Jobs make presentations in Comic Sans?
To begin with, it is important to say that Bungie, the creators of Halo were, during the 90s, one of the main creators of video games for Mac. With the Myth saga of strategy games and the Marathon saga of FPS, games that were very well received among players, and in the case of Marathon, they laid the foundations for the FPS that we see today.
The game is not the Halo we know either, since according to some Bungie employees, Halo for Mac was a third-person multiplayer game that pitted humans and Covenants against each other on a planet, without much more plot. But their visual resemblance is enormous, the Spartans are exactly the same as the Master Chief and the Covenant ships are almost the same as the final versions. Even the weapons are very similar to the final version of Halo.
Apparently, everything changed as soon as Microsoft bought Bungie in 2000 and moved Halo development to Microsoftâs new console, Xbox. Shortly after, Halo would become the flagship game for the Microsoft console. According to what they say, Steve Jobs got very angry with the purchase of Bungie by his rivals, and immediately called Steve Balmer and Ed Fries (Responsible for the purchases of Rare, Ensemble Studios and Bungie). Microsoft agreed to help the development of games for Mac, making ports of some PC games, and even Ed Fries himself had to go to a Mac developers conference to announce this agreement.
According to Ed Fries himself:
âSteve Jobs was very angry when he called Ballmer (Microsoft CEO). And he called angry because we had bought the best Mac game developers and turned them into Xbox developers.â
Itâs incredible how the game that was going to change everything on the Mac ended up making Xbox the console of choice for shooter lovers. I donât understand how Steve Jobs could let Bungie escape. Although perhaps the same thing has happened to Microsoft, after Bungieâs agreement with Activision.
Mac users can settle for the fact that, in 2003, a port of the PC version of Halo ended up coming to Mac (Which in turn was already a port of the Xbox version). Although that game will never be the product that was announced in 1999 at the Macworld Conference & Expo, you can think that perhaps the changes towards a more elaborate offline story versus a multiplayer game made Halo what it is today.
| Via | Kotaku and Develop |
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