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Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

Despite lack of gaming vision, Jobs angered when Microsoft bought Bungie

A new interview shows how angry Steve Jobs became when Microsoft purchased …

Microsoft scored a huge victory when the company bought the then-Mac-centric developer Bungie in 2000 and put it to work creating new games for its upcoming Xbox platform. According to Microsoft's Ed Fries, that purchase angered Steve Jobs, who knew he was losing one of the platform's best developers. Even as Microsoft worked quickly to calm the situation, Jobs seemed to understand he lost something, although he might not have known how important Bungie would become.

The truth is, Apple has historically been unfriendly to gamers and gaming, resulting in many great lost opportunities to lead in the gaming space. Losing Bungie is one example, but Jobs' indifference to gaming also helped create one of the largest gaming publishers in the world.

"As soon as we announced we bought Bungie, Steve Jobs called," Ed Fries, the former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft, told Develop. "He was mad at [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer and phoned him up and was angry because we'd just bought the premier Mac game developer and made them an Xbox developer." 

Bungie had created Marathon, one of gaming's classic FPS titles, on the Mac platform. After the Microsoft purchase, the company began to work exclusively on Xbox development. Fries was tasked with calling Jobs and calming him down.

Develop estimates Microsoft purchased Bungie for around $30 million, which seems absurdly low in the post-Halo world we now inhabit. Microsoft spends something close to that on the open bar of a Halo launch event. The developer has since signed a 10-year publishing deal with Activision Blizzard.

This isn't the first time Jobs missed out on an opportunity that would have changed gaming.

EA under Apple? Almost...

Trip Hawkins knew what he wanted to do since the first time he saw someone with a computer. He pursued his education in technology for that one purpose: to create games. "I really did plan it that far in advance. Again, I continued from 1975 to shape my experience to support EA's eventual birth, including getting an MBA to learn more about business and going to work for Apple to help build the market for computers in the home so that I could then sell games to play on them," Hawkins said in a 2007 interview.

Hawkins was encouraged by those around him to leave Apple in order to start EA, and in this interview he referred to his old coworkers as "ingenious but egotistical software titans." He also hired some of his friends away from Apple to begin his company, which, as we know, found great success in the world of games.

"If it wasn't for Steve Jobs basically saying, 'don't waste my time with games,' we would not have Electronic Arts," Joseph Olin, who was then the president of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, told me at E3 in 2008. The lack of support for games at Apple caused a promising visionary to leave the company, poach talent, and reap the rewards. What would have happened if Jobs listened to Hawkins and offered him both money and a team to pursue gaming from within Apple? The gaming landscape would no doubt be markedly different.

Have things gotten better for gamers with Apple products?

Gaming in the world of Apple is still a dicey affair. The iPhone and iPad are home to some wonderful games, and the low barrier to entry leads to a lot of experimentation and many breakthroughs, but the lack of a physical controller means traditional gaming is impossible. And while it may seem like Apple is now enthusiastic about gaming, the App ecosystem was already in place and developers were lining up to create games, so Apple itself didn't have to do much to encourage iPhone gaming. Apple arguably stumbled into a situation where gaming was allowed to flourish.

The gaming situation is dire in the world of desktop Apple computing, as the systems often ship with low-powered graphics options with inefficient drivers. Valve may be dipping its toe into Mac gaming with the release of Steam, but games still come at a measured pace. Gaming has never been a priority at Apple, and Steve Jobs is a large reason why.

"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 sh*thead list for a while on that, until he needs me to do something else there," id's John Carmack told Eurogamer. "But I think that that's my general opinion. He's not a gamer."

And that's a problem when it comes to evaluating and nurturing talent and vision like Bungie's or Trip Hawkins. "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," Carmack continued. "That's just the bottom line about it."

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