Eurogamer posts an interview with the Makron, John Carmack:
Eurogamer: Turning to the iPhone, how do you do an FPS on a machine with a motion sensor and touch-screen and nothing else? Don’t you need tactile button feedback? Is dragging your thumb around a screen really an acceptable analogue for aiming?
John Carmack: No. There’s obviously a few FPSes out there - Quake ports and stuff like that - and they’re trying out different things and none of them are good yet.
What you have to do when you’re looking at a new platform is not take your favourite thing and try and cram it onto the platform, but you need to look at the platform and see what you can do, which is what we did on our conventional mobile devices. We didn’t try and take over some game that we had that wasn’t going to work well there - we said, well, these are the limitations of the platform, you really kind of want to play with one thumb on here, these are the SKUs we may distribute on there.
We came up with a really completely different game-type for what we’re doing on there, and I think that’s going to be what we look at at the iPhone as well. We have some ideas but until they get more to the point of having something to show people, we don’t want to speculate too much about it, but we are seriously thinking about what we can do that will be cool on the platform.
Eurogamer: Last night you said Apple doesn’t really “deeply get” games. What did you mean by that? And, like Nintendo, do they really need to?
John Carmack: 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]?
But I think the iPhone is a potentially extremely important platform for a lot of reasons, and I think it could be the type of thing that really makes inroads into…does it kill the PSP. There are structural reasons why it’s not going to kill the DS in there, but it certainly should be in there in the running there as a device that you can get modern, quality games for something, and I think it’s a great platform for content and new talent on there.
One of the best opportunities for years right now is for two guys to make a project - you know, an artist and a programmer - to go make something on the iPhone, and I think there are people that can make a couple of million dollars probably by having some breakout success that nobody’s ever heard of, and I think that that’s a really awesome opportunity right now.
The most important bit:
…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]?
I can run Crysis, BioShock, the Half Life series, Mass Effect, the upcoming Fallout 3 and whatever I want on my ‘Mac’ by booting into Vista or XP. Why bother spending money on making games for the Mac when users can easily do this?
The Mac uses open source technologies that in the long run (theoretically at least) will allow developers to support a wider base of users and reach that wonderful land of platform agnostic programming. In the future, everyone, regardless of platform, can enjoy games without picking up a copy of Windows and using proprietary technologies designed to lock you into an OS.
Mac users want to run games under Mac OS X. It’s not the end of the world to boot into Windows, but it does mean purchasing and using a less superior OS with restrictive licensing. I don’t use Windows for anything other than games. Let me run games on my Mac, without Windows, and I will.
Apple are innovative. Just look at the iPhone: it’s literally years ahead of competitor devices. Imagine if Apple could change the way your computer works with OpenCL? Imagine if your engine could run at silly speeds, spawn an AI and revolutionise gaming? Bring on the Apple spawned AI mechs to destroy us all.
My hope is that if games are developed for Mac OS X, Apple will be more competitive with hardware and further enhance the operating system to support developers. Once you’ve got developers truly working with Apple there’s no end to what could be produced.
I don’t think the Mac would spawn a renaissance in gaming, but the more games out there the better. What’s needed is for Apple to, shock horror, have a gaming divison. Liase with developers. Talk to them. If Apple could support games, sales would rocket. I guarantee it (I’ll give Apple £10 if I’m wrong). Diehard PC users won’t give a shit. But the Mac users and the users out there who just want stuff to just work, will give a shit.
Hell, once Apple do get their head screwed with regards to games, what will all the PC fanboys say about Macs once their “Apple doesn’t do games” line is gone? There’d be panic, rioting and possibly tears.
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