You might be aware that E3, the largest annual computer game industry expo, has just finished. It brought with it a host of encouraging announcements on the Mac front. Sierra's hit PC first person shooter Half Life, which was released half a year ago to critical acclaim, is coming to the Mac, as are
Madden NFL 2000 and Backyard Football. This is good news because the Mac is severely lacking in sports games. Quake II is coming to the Mac soon, as (more significantly) is Quake Arena.
Quake Arena is a symbol of resurgent Mac gaming because it is coming out on the Mac at the same time as on the PC. This has really grabbed PC gamers‚Äö attention as we got one of the first public Quake 3 demos (at Apple Expo) and the Quake 3 test was released on Mac first. Woo hoo! Other simultaneous Mac-PC releases announced were Descent 3, the long awaited Diablo II, a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine shooter and, marking a welcome return to the Mac by LucasArts, Star Wars Episode 1: Pod Racer.
Of course, part of the Mac's success in attracting new games developers can be put down to the iMac's market saturation. And of course the Kandy Kolored Tangerine (or Blueberry, Grape, Strawberry or Lime) Flake Streamline Baby* has greatly increased the Mac's market share. But Steve Jobs‚Äö Apple has gone out of its way to entice games makers. They have vigorously pursued Games Sprockets, introduced OpenGL as the Mac standard for 3D, and wooed big names like id in an attempt to persuade the smaller names to follow them. Hats off to Steve yet again. The PowerPC is gaining strength too, IBM having just signed a deal with Nintendo to supply 400 MHz chips for their new console. The huge audience Nintendo is sure to sell to will help provide momentum for the PowerPC.
Now, you might have noticed that a lot of these new releases involving hacking people to death, or burning them in their pods, or else shooting them. Games which involve shooting people have come under fire (ha ha) recently, what with the Colorado shootings. In deed there have even been calls for games like Grand Theft Auto and Quake to be banned. You may have seen the outcry in the newspapers recently about a game called Kingpin. Kingpin, coming out soon on the PC, is set in a criminal world where you beat women to death with lead pipes and swearing is frequent. Funnily enough, while computer game magazines don't object to the violence, they do feel compelled to bleep out the swear words. For the kids, you know.
It is easy to dismiss Jeremy Paxman, who has probably never played a computer game in his life, when he asks of Grand Theft Auto: ‘You mean adults actually play these things?’ Grand Theft Auto, a very playable and successful British game, has an 18 certificate. Go figure. However, there are many in favour of imposing draconian new censorship laws, and those of us who know about computer games should make sure they are not passed. It's the availability of guns, not games, that is the real problem in America.
*That's the name of Tom Wolfe's first book, in case you didn't know.
