After selling $170 million in Halo 3 games it makes you wonder where it all came from. As Steve Chazin in the marketingapple.com blog points out:
One of the best games ever for the Mac was a little product known as Marathon from a little company known as Bungie. Keep in mind that Steve Jobs did NOT want the Mac to be a gaming system for he feared it would not be taken seriously by business users who were the target audience way back in 1984. As a result the Mac suffered (and continues to suffer) from not having great games, and very few exclusive games. But, at the MacWorld 1999 tradeshow during his keynote, Steve Jobs introduced the follow up to that Bungie hit, another Mac-only game simply called Halo.
It was a ground breaking demo - the effect being that the Mac had the power to redefine the PC gaming experience. However, Microsoft was watching the keynote and they were searching for a breakthrough platform exclusive for their yet-to-be-released system, Xbox. So on June 19, 2000 Microsoft acquired Bungie and in one fell swoop killed the Mac version, got the killer app they were looking for, transferred the buzz into interest in their system, blocked the Mac from encroaching on the PC’s territory as a gaming system, and stuck it to the Mac faithful who were waiting for Halo for more than a year.
The biggest irony being that the xbox 360 runs on powerpc processors.
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