The State of the Games
by John Brandon

There’s a crack in the sky – light is pouring in, and the doomsday hour is finally at an end. That’s right: the Mac is ready for a major rebound in gaming. Just look at the marketplace: in the console world, Microsoft has a major conundrum on their hands. It turns out that, despite its success and a long list of triple-A games from major developers, the Xbox 360 has serious hardware problems. Gamers keep reporting the “ring of death” malfunction, and Microsoft will lose about $1B US by extending the repair warranty to three years. Meanwhile, the PlayStation 3 has bottomed out as a premium system with precious few exclusive games and a handful of cross-platform games – it’s not exactly the worldwide hit that Sony expected. Sure, the Nintendo Wii is selling quickly, but it’s debatable whether the hype over motion-sensing control can really last more than another year. And then there’s the PC. For every amazing first-person shooter – e.g., Half-Life 2 and its episodic add-ons -- there’s a dozen craptastic games such as Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek and various lame console ports.

This “world aligning” opportunity is not lost on Apple or Electronic Arts. At WWDC 2007, Steve Jobs announced he had “some great news about games -- EA, the number one publisher of games, is coming back to Mac in a big way.” EA then officially announced several new games in development for the Mac, including Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars, Battlefield 2142, Madden NFL 2008, Tiger Woods 2008, Need for Speed Carbon, and a new Harry Potter game based on the summer movie. Of those, both Madden and Tiger Woods are particularly interesting because they will be released at the same time as the console versions. (EA stopped releasing PC versions of sports games several years ago.)

ID Software also announced the development of iD Tech 5, a new graphics development platform that runs exclusively on the Mac. During the demo, famed Doom and Quake luminary John Carmack noted that there were as many as 20GB worth of textures on the screen at one time, and showed a rendering engine that obviously took advantage of the Mac graphics processing and ATI chipset abilities. It was unclear whether the game development platform itself runs on the Mac but will be used to make PC and console games, or whether iD might release first-party Mac games eventually.

Most importantly, while Apple is making an obvious platonic shift into the consumer market with products such as the iPhone and Apple TV, the Jobs keynote focused on Mac gaming for several minutes and revealed a strategy to promote game development again. Was it just the tip of the iceberg? Will other developers such as Activision and Ubisoft eventually follow suit? And, what does Apple’s renewed interest in gaming mean for existing third-party developers such as Aspyr? Will the perception that the Mac is more of a shareware games platform finally change? Or, should it? To find out, we checked in with several Mac developers and experts to find out the state of the games on Mac.

Long and storied history
It might be surprising to learn that the creator of the best-selling game of all time – Halo 2 for Xbox 260 – started life as a Mac-only developer. Bungie released Marathon in late 1994, just in time for Christmas. It was a pivotal release: since the Mac’s debut in 1984, games tended to be poorly rendered 16-bit shareware products for kids, sometimes disguised as edutainment. Marathon was different. It was one of the first games to support multiplayer gaming on a network, used state-of-the-art graphics, and featured a deep, well-crafted single-player storyline. Mac gamers quickly gravitated to it – in fact, just about every multiplayer shooter on the market, including Gears of War on Xbox 360 and Resistance: Fall of Mac on Playstation 3 can trace their lineage back to Marathon. And, the first Halo game for Xbox was originally developed for Mac as a Marathon successor. It’s also surprising to note that Electronics Arts started out as a Mac and Apple II developer – one of their first games ever was a pinball construction game on Apple II, and a shufflepuck game for the early grayscale Mac SE.

The first gaming milestones came even earlier: the Mac was the first platform to offer 256-color games and digitized audio for both in-game actions and background music. “Those games, crude by today's measure, were groundbreaking, and you couldn't find anything like that on a PC,” says Brian Greenstone, the president of Mac development house Pangea Software Games. “Then there was the age of the rendered 3D game with titles like Myst and all those other rendered adventure and puzzle games. Those were all Mac-first, and they kept the Mac at the top of the game - no pun intended.”

“For game specific milestones, there were the big firsts: getting the first Tomb Raider game on the Mac, and the first big sports game -- at least big for American sports fans: Madden NFL,” added Glenda Adams, the development director at Aspyr Media, Inc. “There’s also the amazing success of games such as The Sims and the Civilization series on the Mac. And it's hard to talk about Mac games without mentioning some of the great Mac-only or Mac-first games, like Marathon or SimCity.”

Unfortunately, in the late 90s, Apple seemed to abandon Mac gaming, at least in terms of third-party developer support. The break in the momentum can be traced specifically back to the Game Sprockets API, which allowed game developers to write game code. It was a major feature in OS 9, released in 2002. The Draw Sprocket controlled on-screen action, the Net Sprocket helped developers create network code for multiplayer, and the Sound Sprocket created the link between the game and Mac audio hardware. There was also the Input Sprocket for joystick, keyboard, and mouse control. With OS X, Apple left out all of these APIs except for the Input Sprocket. No other factor explains why companies such as Aspyr and MacSoft are so dominant now in porting commercial games to the Mac, and why first-party developers such as Activision or Ubisoft do not release original Mac games.

“It still seems to be a widespread thought, that there are no games available for the Macintosh,” says Thomas Steiding, the CEO of Mac game developer Rune-Soft, based in Germany. “This is hardly true these days, as there are more than 250 titles available through distributors for the Mac, but I think Apple has not done too much in the past to change this bias.”

“There aren't any real technology barriers preventing games from coming to the Mac, it's all about sales,” says Aspyr’s Adams. “If games sell, there will be more available. For some reason, Mac users don't seem to be as apt to buy games as Windows users. I think Apple could definitely give the Mac game market a boost by pushing gaming as a use for Macs in their marketing messages.” 

Mac Gaming Rebound
This year, the message about games seems to be changing, most notably with Electronic Arts and iD Software. Both companies feel it is too early to talk about future developments (Apple and Electronic Arts declined to comment about future gaming initiatives), but the games speak for themselves.

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for example, the graphics rendering engine is a giant leap forward from previous Harry Potter games – such as Aspyr’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Game characters look like their real movie counterparts, and spells flow and sparkle on the screen in a more believable fashion. Part of the credit must go to Transgaming Technologies, who assisted EA in porting the game to the Mac using their Cider engine. The game engine is a boon for Mac development, because it “wraps” the Win32 API used for game coding in a Mac shell. This makes it easier to port games, because there are no extra coding efforts, even for the networking, graphics, copy protection, and game matching system to connect players in a lobby, which are all part of the Cider engine.

Another reason Mac gaming is on a rebound has to do with the sheer popularity of Apple. After selling some 500,000 iPhones at launch (according to Piper Jaffray) and with 100 million iPods on the market as of April, 2007, the company is just a consumer darling – and their rising stock price underscores that concept. Mac sales increased 36 percent in the second quarter of 2007 over the same quarter last year, hitting about 1.5 million units sold worldwide. That’s a growing user base for games. Meanwhile, the Mac desktop has pushed past the PC with the eight-core Mac Pro running at 3.0GHz. While the PC has a distinct advantage with DirectX 10 graphics cards such as the Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GTS – which supports Shader Model 4.0 and has 640MB of internal graphics storage for game rendering – the Mac Pro lets you add as many as four NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB graphics cards.

It’s also worth noting that the Mac makes it much easier for developers to create games, knowing that the platform is more predictable and stable for games. “The Mac has a great advantage over Windows in having a smaller number of possible configurations to support,” says Aspyr’s Adams. “Instead of hundreds or thousands of strange combinations of sound chips, video cards, and motherboards, the Mac has a more manageable set of hardware configurations. Hardware-wise, the Mac can keep up with the consoles fine. There aren't any missing OS features or hardware pieces that prevent any game from running on the Mac, so it's mostly an issue of the sheer number of games that come out.”

That final issue – the Mac gaming user base – is the one issue that seems to be preventing from major third-party developers from climbing aboard the Apple gaming bandwagon. Ubisoft and Activision both declined to comment on any new activities for Mac gaming, even though these two publishers are the closest competitors to EA. Until they announce new efforts for the Mac, the perceptions might change slowly from a “shareware only” mentality and console ports to a new upswing in commercial game development that mirrors the innovation and first-to-market capability that Marathon started back in 1994. And yet, Apple should never be discounted in any market. They dominate in music, seem to be rising to the top of the cell phone market, and could very well take over dwindling PC gaming landscape – especially if there’s a new push for shooters and action games, not Nancy Drew mysteries.

Conclusion
This time next year – or possibly the year after – the state of Mac gaming could significantly change, with more commercial developers on board, a lessened emphasis on edutainment and shareware, and better graphical improvements. That’s when we’ll all finally see the power of the Mac platform shine in ways that it already does in photo editing, video processing, usability, and just everyday use.

Sidebar: Need for Speed Carbon
Racing fans can rejoice over EA’s latest story-based racing game – which has some of the slickest graphics you will see on a Mac with winding roads glazed over with rain, tracks based on real-world locations, cars such as the Aston Martin DB9 that are powerful and sleek, and a new emphasis on racing game mechanics such as drafting behind a car for speed gains and blockers who assist with rough street racing tactics. It’s still unclear whether the Mac version will support any third-party racing wheels, but a new “autosculpt” mode gives you even more control over the look and performance of vehicles.

Sidebar: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoneix
Harry Potter is growing up – and he is preparing for an all-out battle with the dark side. In the latest installment from EA, released for the Mac at the same time as the console versions, the young apprentice wizard trains fellow Hogwarts students and complete several open-ended quests and side missions. Although the game is billed as a “sandbox” version where you can go anywhere you want, the reality is that you have to complete certain key quests in order – like every other adventure RPG. Graphics are smooth and bright on the Mac, but not exactly state-of-the-art.