The PC gaming industry is stronger and there are many who agree that we are living in a true second golden age of gaming. gaming pc; however, nothing would be as it is now if it were not for the events that occurred more than 20 years ago, precisely at the turn of the millennium. Did you know Manzana was about to follow a strategy very focused on the video game after the return of Steve Jobs in 1997? Here we will tell you in detail much of what could have been one of the main focuses of the Mac, but never happened.
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The prodigal son at the time of the PS1
The return of Steve Jobs from 1997 is well known, when he returned to Apple, the company that he himself had founded (and from which he was fired in 1985) to occupy a high position after many years of adventures. Well, the challenge of the marketing genius at that time was to make his beloved apple survive, and for this he even had to resort to an alliance with Microsoft (at that time, his greatest nemesis) that would allow him to keep the company at float.
Apart from all the agreements that were generated by this (such as including Internet Explorer as the default browser on Macs), Steve Jobs knew that the course he had to take to save his company was that of innovation, and for this he was more than willing to point to other markets. In fact, this philosophy would be enshrined later with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
YOU CAN SEE: As it did? The time Steve Jobs managed to sell a PlayStation 1 emulator for Mac
Gaming in the 90s
Well, long before all those revolutions happened (portable music and streaming services, smartphones and tablets), what was in vogue at the end of the 90s were video games, especially thanks to the new paradigm that they meant the first graphic accelerators (such as the mythical Voodoo 3dfx) and the rise of the shooter genre. The truth is that Jobs had more than one attempt to make the Mac begin to gain ground and be seen as the “definitive machines to play”, something that is far from what ended up happening.
Steve Jobs’ attempts at gaming
There were many announcements that Steve Jobs himself made in the period of 1999 and 2000 regarding gaming. On one occasion during 1999 Mac World Expothe Californian surprised the entire audience by announcing Connectix’s Virtual Game Station, nothing less than a PS1 emulator that was going to be sold for Macs and that was demonstrated live during that same presentation.
Jobs wanted to adopt the fashion of shooters for Apple
A year later, during MacWorld 2000, Jobs presented a video in which John Carmack himself (co-creator of Doom and co-founder of id Software) praised the features of the new Macs and also announced that the next Quake III would be available for the platform. .
Already in 2001, Jobs announced with great emotion the association of Apple and Nvidia –which at that time was already beginning to appear as the leading company in dedicated graphics processors–. On that occasion, they presented the expected Doom III to the world for the first time.
Halo could be from Apple
However, if there is a fact that, had it had another outcome, would have almost completely changed the history of computer gaming, that is definitely the approach that Steve Jobs had with the original Bungie team.
During MacWorld 1999, Bungie was invited to the annual exhibition in Cupertino to present nothing less than his long-awaited video game Halo, which was originally going to be exclusive to Apple platforms, at least by initial agreement.
For this moment, Halo it was already in an advanced state of development and it was already known how impressive it could be. It was considered one of the most promising titles of the ‘next generation’ and used to grace magazine covers.
The truth is that, by the year 2000, Microsoft joined the fight for the gaming territory on PC and even decided at that time to launch its own console. There were even attempts by Bill Gates to acquire the hardware division of SEGA, which in 2001 would end up closing forever.
With the gaming market on the rise, the vultures gathered and the fight began, and Halo ended up ditching the Mac platform much to the disappointment of Steve Jobs. Microsoft managed to acquire the exclusivity of the game and since then it has dominated the PC gaming industry thanks to its advances in its own proprietary API DirectXwith which it continues to dominate the market to this day.
What Jobs thought about gaming
There are not many records of Steve Jobs commenting on his ideas about video games, but he certainly mentioned them on more than one occasion, especially relating them to other paradigms such as virtual reality and web-based services.
In an interview in 1990, Jobs commented: “I remember when the video game phenomenon exploded. What I found most interesting was that after just a few years since it started, children (and not so children) were spending 2.5 billion dollars in pennies every year. You can see these things as simple games and ignore them, or you can see them as fairly simple simulation environments for learning. In a game of Pong, you’re constantly seeing how well you’re doing by looking at the scoreboard that shows your score, but if we take this concept further, we can extend it to more sophisticated principles, and suddenly we might wonder how well France would have done in the times of Louis XIV. This type of simulation suddenly becomes less trivial than in a simple game, but the principles remain the same.
We can only conclude that, to be fair to Jobs’ reputation as a visionary, it is most likely that he was aware of the growth that video games were going to have in the new millennium, and that his attempts to gain ground in that market were justified.