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Executives from game publisher heavyweights Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: ERTS) (EA) and Id Software joined Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs onstage at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco to announce that both companies would port their popular games to the Macintosh computer platform.
Why now? Is it because Apple's computers are becoming increasingly popular? Is it Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) processors, which make it easier to develop games for both the PC and Mac markets at the same time? Or is it all for the love of two teenage daughters?
Four Big Names
"I have two teenage daughters. They live on MacBook. I have friends in the music business, in the movie business, in the photography business, in the graphic design business. They live on OS X. Our CTO at Electronic Arts lives on Mac, and we're seeing EA technologists move to Mac in droves," Bing Gordon, EA cofounder and chief creative officer, explained.
"And what do they all want ... in addition to a cinema display? They want to go into an Apple store and they want to see all the latest EA games, simultaneously released with all of the other platforms. So I'm here today to announce we are going to rectify the situation. Starting in July, we are going to bring four of our biggest titles to run on OS X."
Harry Potter
EA will release its shooter games "Command and Conquer 3" and "Battlefield 2142," as well as its driving game, "Need for Speed Carbon," and the book/movie-inspired "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." In addition, EA will also release "Madden NFL '08" and "Tiger Woods PGA Tour '08" later this summer.
As for Id Software, John Carmack, the company's cofounder and technical director, demonstrated its never-before-seen, next-generation game engine technology, Id Tech 5, running on a Mac. The new engine will power Id's new games and will be licensed to third parties. Some of Id's massively popular franchises include "Doom," "Quake" and "Wolfenstein" -- some of which were available on the Mac back when the computers' processors ran on PowerPC-based chips.
"Since many developers at Id have made the switch to the Mac for their personal use, we decided it was now time to bring our core game technology to OS X," Carmack explained. "After a rapid bring-up of the code base, we were delighted to find that the latest Macs are the fastest systems in our offices for some of the time-consuming processing jobs and will be contributing to our development process in many useful ways."
The new Id Tech 5 engine will come with a suite of tools that will let developers create games with vast outdoor landscapes that are completely unique to the horizon and have indoor environments capable of unprecedented artistic detail, Id said.
PC Gaming Isn't Dead
With the appeal of the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3, isn't PC-based gaming largely dead?
"The PC game market isn't dead -- everybody says it's dead -- but it's not dead. It's still vibrant. We're just in the middle of a new generation of console cycle, which gets more attention, but the PC is still a viable platform," Billy Pidgeon, IDC's program manager for the consumer gaming market, told MacNewsWorld.
Apple actually avoided the gaming business for many years to help boost the reputation of the Mac as a creative tool rather than a gaming platform for kids, said Pidgeon. It's only recently, he explained, that there's been a strong call for gaming on Macs.
Go Native
"Jobs and company are going to really have to concentrate on bringing games over to the Mac -- you know, make it easy," Pidgeon noted. "And it really needs to be native because just running on an emulator is not the answer. Games can help the Mac get stronger penetration if it has good support 
for games, because now, for people for whom games are important, they just write off the Mac."
On the plus side, Pidgeon said, Apple doesn't necessarily have to create specialized boxes just to compete with Dell's (Nasdaq: DELL) Alienware or HP's (NYSE: HPQ) Voodoo lines, which have been targeted successfully at the PC gamer market.
"They could specialize in a certain type of high-end, but I would argue that the Macs are already high-end," he said.
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