Screenshot from Carmack’s unnamed game
At Apple’s WWDC, Electronic Arts co-founder Bing Gordon and id’s John Carmack took the stage to pledge Mac support.
Gordon went first, announcing that EA’s first four titles will be Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need For Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Then, beginning in August, the company will release its EA Sports games Madden ’08 and Tiger Woods for the Mac on the same day that the PC products launch.
Then, John Carmack came on stage to demo the technology from his his never-before-seen new game: “The demo begins with a kind of Road Warrior/Mad Max world fly through. What we’ve got here is the entire world covered in unique textures. 20GB or so of textures covering every surface of this racetrack.”
The game itself, still unnamed, will be shown on Mac, PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 later this year.
I’m probably the only one of the DU Crew who isn’t a bit of a gamer. But, I appreciate the advances in graphics tech brought to all of us by folks designing for the genre.
It should be noted that EA is using Cider to port their games to the Mac to cut down on the development time.
John Carmack has done this before back in ’99. I don’t think he ever really stopped supporting Macs, so this is nothing new.
I swore I’d never buy another Apple after getting screwed back in the days of the Apple ][+, but I have to admit, the Macs have started to look more appealing since they’ve gone over to the Intel platform. I think my next computer will probably be a Macpro running Parallel. And with Starcraft2 coming out on the Mac, it’s become even more thinkable. 😀
http://www.starcraft2.com/
#1 hit the key point of this story. Cider allows for the Win32 API calls from a game to be translated to another platform. Watch for other game makes to follow suit if (and only if) EA is successful.
not a gamer but this seems like a ripple that could grow – gaming has always been a major linchpin of windows
Now lets wait and see the hordes of gamers screaming at their macs when they realize their games stopped running the moment they updated the OS.
Since you can only use three or four models of graphics cards with Macs, and the only Mac that has a replaceable/upgradeable graphics card is the Mac Pro, which _starts_ at $2500, I don’t see the Mac becoming a gamer’s platform of choice.
Buy an $800 PC with slots and drive bays (and put Windows XP on it) and spend the money you save on a killer graphics card.
But if you want to run games on the built-in graphics in a Mac Mini, it’ll only cost you $600 to play at 15 frames-per-second (monitor not included).
#7 – Because, after all, Apple really gives a shit about the hardcore market.
This isn’t about the hardcore losers, it’s about the guys that occasionally want to play a game.
#7, this is pc gaming reality
and incidentally, this is by far the bestselling console
With the dreadful non-upgradability of macs, I really can’t see EA sticking with this for too long.
Thats to say nothing for the tiny % of the market they think they’ll capture.
I give this 2 years max!
I do not think this is going to be big business for Id or EA games.
After all the top selling Apple computer the MacBook has Intel graphics and cannot even run these games! Which I think Steve and his crew made the only real error in the MacBook was not giving it a better graphics card. Of course Mac Mini owners are in the dark too on this.
#8
It’s more about the college students realizing their “superior” Macbooks won’t run the games their peers can in their “inferior” laptops.