Will the iPhone Break Apple's Gaming Curse? | Jim Lynch: Tech Tips, Opinions and Reviews

Will the iPhone Break Apple’s Gaming Curse?

By Jim on July 10th, 2008

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Curses are tough things to deal with. Sometimes they take a long time to get rid of as the Red Sox know very well. The team was plagued for 86 years by the “Curse of the Bambino” and it wasn’t until 2004 that the Red Sox finally vanquished the curse by beating the lame New York Yankees. Red Sox fans everywhere rejoiced in the team’s triumph as the curse was ended and the evil Yankees were finally put in their rightful place as losers.

In its own way Apple has had to deal with an equally vexing curse: gaming. Apple has never been able to make its products into the kind of gaming successes that other companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony have been able to achieve. Macs have long been the laughingstock of the gaming world with few games being produced for them with the exception of products from Blizzard and a few other companies.

All that may change with the introduction of the iPhone 3G this week. While I panned the hardware changes in two previous columns there’s much more to this release than just hardware changes. Along with the new phone we’ll also be getting the iPhone 2.0 software and the apps store.

What interests me in this column though is just one part of the apps store—gaming. One of the most hyped things at Steve Jobs’ latest keynote was a demo of Super Monkey Ball from Sega. Supposedly this game will herald in a new era of mobile gaming as the iPhone becomes a major portable gaming platform.

Excuse me but I can’t help but feel nervous and somewhat skeptical about this.

Apple’s Track Record on Gaming
Before we get into why gaming might or might not succeed on the iPhone it’s important to note Apple’s terrible record when it comes to gaming. Apple has never made much effort to really make its products gamer-friendly and the company has made no secret of this.

But every so often the company burps out some silly rhetoric about games and then promptly does absolutely nothing. Remember the interview with Valve’s Gabe Newell?

In it he spelled out how hard he was working with Apple to get anything related to games done:

Kikizo: People keep asking you about a potential Macintosh version, and your stance is that this is a strictly Windows project…?

Gabe: Well, we tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to… well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go “wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming”. And then we’ll say, “OK, here are three things you could do to make that better”, and then they say OK, and then we never see them again.

And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow through on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there’s never any follow through on any of the things they say they’re going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms.

Kikizo: So you think it’s all because of staff turnaround in their gaming department?

Gabe: I just don’t think they’ve ever taken gaming seriously. And none of the things developers ask them to do are done. And as a result, there’s no gaming market there to speak of. We’d love it if they would get serious about it. But they never have, and can’t even follow through on any of their commitments for game developers.

Kikizo: So would you say that the rumour that crops up every couple of years that Apple is about to do a big plan and release a console box, is basically bullshit?

Gabe: We’ve seen no evidence that they are able to follow through on even simple programs in the game space. It seems bizarre to me because it’s like one of the biggest things holding them back in the consumer space. If you look at a Macintosh right now, it does a lot of things really well compared to a Vista PC, but there are no games.

Why, I don’t know. If I were a Macintosh product manager, it would be pretty high on my list, and a problem to get taken care of, as probably the number one thing holding them back with consumers.

I think Newell has hit the nail squarely on the head about Apple and gaming. Is Apple schizophrenic when it comes to gaming? Apparently the company can’t get the right prescription to get a handle on its illness. Can’t somebody get Apple a recommendation for a good psychiatrist? Sheesh.

Think I’m exaggerating? Well remember Steve Jobs’ keynote a while back in 2007? I pointed out then in my column Did Apple Lie to Mac Gamers that the supposed EA and Apple gaming alliance wouldn’t amount to very much and apparently—it hasn’t.

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