KEY POINTS:
Most PC users like to recite that there are no - or at least few - games for the Mac.
This is true to a certain extent - a lot of the lesser titles certainly don't ever make it to the Mac. Sadly, some of the big titles
don't make it either. This all used to be different. Macs were advanced enough graphically that when Mac gaming developer Bungie developed Marathon, gamers had reason to seriously consider the Macintosh as a gamer platform par excellence and it was PC users clamouring for ports of the Mac gaming packages.
But this was way back in the 1990s. Chicago-based Bungie Software Products Corporation was formed by two undergraduate students from the University of Chicago, Alex Seropian and Jason Jones.
Marathon was awesome for the day - a visually rich and immersive environment set in the future, it totally sucked gamers into its twisted and violent world. Bungie went on to produce the popular Myth series and Oni, both for Mac, and by the later part of the '90s, Mac gamers were eagerly awaiting Bungie's next effort. Everyone seemed to know it would be called Halo.
But then something happened that changed everything. Microsoft acquired Bungie - at first it was business as usual, except that Halo would be a first-person action game for Windows. But also for Mac - in fact, its public unveiling occurred at the Macworld Expo of 1999.
A year later, that party ended. Microsoft announced Halo would be continue to be developed as an exclusive title for the Xbox. Aargh.
This began a fallow period for Macs where, following the Bungie example, games came to be developed first for PCs and then - with any luck - they were ported by to Macs, with notable third-party companies like Feral Interactive and Aspyr doing excellent ports. A few games developers, like Burning Monkey, kept games dual-platform on release, but this certainly wasn't the trend.
By the time Medal of Honour, then Call of Duty, players got their Mac versions, months had gone by. Months are aeons in online gaming. The green Mac players were liberally fragged all over cyberspace by their way-more-experienced PC-armed cousins.
Call of Duty 4 is a prime example. It has been out for PCs for months, while Mac players were still stuck in CoD2 (CoD3 looked awesome, then got skipped for Macs). When Netropolitan gets to release Call of Duty 4 in New Zealand (the worldwide release of CoD4 for Mac was slated for September 15th), any Mac players venturing online (like the members of the Kiwi MadMacs gaming clan) will be frag-bait. Literally and liberally.
There have been exceptions - The Sims got its Mac ports pretty quickly, and World of Warcraft was simultaneous, with the expansion packs lagging. These games are not only pretty much platform transparent to play, but are also popular with female gamers right from the word go, so that the scary Warlord in WoW who puts a spell on you and binds you might be a 14-year-old girl in Japan playing on a Mac (Japan has a high Mac take-up, by the way).
Spore, the ultimate God game and possibly one that will eclipse the mega-successful Sims franchise, is available on Mac.
Spore is the only game that allows creative personalities to explore the depths of their own personal galaxy from the microbe level on up. A PC version of the game has been released but its creator, Electronic Arts, released the game simultaneously on PC and Mac.
EA used TransGaming's Cider portability technology to bring the title over to the Mac. There's even a version for the iPhone and iPod touch. As the Mac carries on picking up market share, Mac users hope this is a trend that will expand.
Games that start on PCs then eventually make it to the Mac are either fantastic - benefiting from Apple's CoreAudio and CoreGraphics routines - or buggy and half-hearted, depending on how rigorous the porting procedure has been.
But things are improving. Two things help - the adoption of the Intel processor on the Macintosh platform has made porting a whole lot faster and easier than it used to be, and virtualisation software like VMWare Fusion and Parallels Workstation let developers run Windows and Mac versions alongside each other on single machines for checking and recoding.
Of course, both these applications also let you play all those Windows games on your Mac, too.
Meanwhile, Mac gamers are hoping Bungie will look at the Mac platform again, since its separation from Microsoft a year ago.
