[slavik81]

> Did Steve Jobs really dislike games?

Dislike may be a bit strong, but John Carmack described him as indifferent:

> Over the years I've been through a number of initiatives where Apple wants to get serious about games, and we've done things with them. The idea way back with Quake 3 on there, that was my deal with Steve Jobs: if Apple adopts OpenGL rather than going off and doing QuickTime3D or something else of their own which was going to be a bad idea, then I'll personally port the Quake 3 stuff rather than working with a partner company on that. And we went through all that. All of our Apple ports have been successful - they've all made money - but it's marginal money, and we have worked with Aspyr usually on all the other ones after that, but I do think it kind of comes from the top.

> The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games. This is going to be one of those things that I say something in an interview and it gets fed back to him and I'm on his shithead list for a while on that, until he needs me to do something else there. But I think that that's my general opinion. He's not a gamer. It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in. I mean obviously he believes in the music and the iTunes and that whole side of things, and the media side of things, and he gets it and he pushes it and they do wonderful things with that, but he's not a gamer. That's just the bottom line about it.

> There are people at Apple who want to support all this - and there's no roadblocks for us right now, we're going to support the Mac on Rage, we hope to get a version of Quake Live going up on the Mac there - but it's just that's not what the Mac platform's about, and I don't really expect that to change because it's a tough equation now that you've got everybody dual-booting their Macs and everything: why would you want to go to the extra trouble of [developing games for Mac]?

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/id-softwares-john-carmack...

[bangonkeyboard]

This always struck me as highly shortsighted of Jobs and other Apple leadership. Games helped to drive and define the Apple II and Macintosh successes, and the virtuous cycle of gamers growing up on those platforms and then wanting to try their hands at developing their own games for them is how many, many software developers got their start, including some who later found themselves at Apple. What's especially strange is that that list of former videogame developers includes Jobs and Wozniak.

Apple later lucked into a gaming market with iPhone, but they're still awkward at it (just see the games they choose to showcase onstage) and there is very little cross-pollination that considers the Mac as a gaming platform.

[kalleboo]

When the Mac was originally launched, there was an industry perception that GUIs were toys not suitable for business, so Apple was very worried that being a games platform would reinforce that image[0]. That initial worry seems to have left scar tissue in their corporate culture that would haunt Apple for decades.

[0]e.g. see the concluding paragraph on https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

[CountSessine]

Games helped to drive and define the Apple II and Macintosh successes

Apple II, but Macintosh? I'm not sure I agree with that.

I think a lot of Jobs' opinions about personal computers gelled in the 80's. Back then, with the various Sinclair machines, the Ataris, the C64, and the Amiga, there were a lot of people who said that games actually harmed those platforms. In North America at least, having a large library of games made businesses see those platforms as toys and game consoles. Why would you buy an office full of game consoles? You're a serious business man wearing a serious business suit, running a serious business, and you need computers from a serious business computer company that can run serious business software! You need an IBM!

[wtallis]

> You're a serious business man wearing a serious business suit, running a serious business, and you need computers from a serious business computer company that can run serious business software! You need an IBM!

To be fair, that mindset predates the use of personal computers to do serious graphics business. The Mac is largely responsible for making that mindset obsolete with things like desktop publishing and Photoshop. The same attributes that made the Mac a good platform for those use cases also made it much more suited to gaming than DOS-era PCs.

[aksss]

> much more suited to gaming than DOS-era PCs.

Is that really true? I was alive during DOS-era gaming and still remember kids from Mac families standing out on the sidewalk in the rain crying like Oliver Twist weenies because they couldn’t get their game on. Meanwhile PC - read _intel_ - games we’re writing their own low-level memory managers to eek everything out of the platform possible. I was inside playing Ultima VII or playing Falcon 3.0 with a remote friend _over modem_ drinking hot chocolate. I think any review of the games catalogs would show that the market clearly judged the Mac as less well-suited for gaming.

[pjmlp]

In Europe most serious graphics business during DOS-era PCs, was done in Amiga and Atari STs.