The man with the dirty Mac…

The Apple iMac has to be one of the design and marketing successes of the last ten years. It single handedly rejuvenated a flagging company and forced basically all of the major PC hardware and software manufacturers to go to the mattresses and reevaluate their strategies. Hardware manufacturers suddenly had to pretty up their offerings with translucent color patches, most memorably done by Compaq with their iPaq desktop system. But the most serious change came in software: developers who had slowly phased the Macintosh platform out of their software futures, and then BOOM! Suddenly they had to get back on the Mac bandwagon PDQ, and surprisingly many companies have done it very successfully, especially the huge but surprisingly agile Microsoft, who got a full range of software out very quickly indeed.

Considering that iMacs, and their iBook laptop equivalents have been mainly aimed at students, young people looking for their first real computer and so called 'lifestyle' computer users you would think that entertainment and games software developers would be flooding the Apple market with new software aimed at these groups. Indeed, for many years Mac aficionados have argued for, even demanded that games software should be written for, or even merely ported to, their beloved platform. They have had reasonable offerings along both lines from the excellent MacSoft and others, but on the whole they have been neglected.

In spite of this surge in Mac uptake by exactly the demographic groups game developers want to sell their product to, developers are proving to be a bit sluggish in going to the big Mac. Take a look at the current Mac games chart, and it gives you a very mixed picture:

1. Unreal Tournament. 2. Fun Pack ??? 3. Sim City 3000. 4. Age of Empires for Mac. 5. Star Wars Episode 1: Racer. 6. Alpha Centauri 7. Quake III: Arena. 8. Caesar 3. 9. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. 10. Mac Seven (any relation to badass gangster rapper Mac 10?)

There are a smattering of fine games in this list, sure. But a couple of things are very noticeable; firstly, all the games are very good but quite old. It seems that games companies think that it is only worth porting games to the Mac platform if they have sold shedloads on the PC and are almost guaranteed to sell some on the Mac. This means that while Mac gamers are almost always assured of quality, they also get no say as to what games they receive. Take the Panzer General series, some of the best selling wargames of all time. Mac gamers have clamored for a high quality wargame for some time, but because the PC wargames market is depressed it is no way, amigo.

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