Apple CEO Steve Jobs was "furious" when Microsoft announced the acquisition of Halo studio Bungie back in 2000 - and allegedly had to be calmed down with the promise that the studio's Xbox games would be ported to Mac.

Former Xbox boss, Ed Fries has revealed how he had to personally broker a deal with the fuming Apple boss, following Microsoft's move to turn the then premier Mac game developer into an Xbox-only studio.


"As soon as we announced we bought Bungie, Steve Jobs called," Fries 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."

In order to cool the situation, the Xbox co-creator revealed, the platform holder took the brash move to help Bungie's former president setup an entire company with the sole purpose of porting Windows hits to Mac.

"So, during the day, I got an email from Steve Ballmer asking me to phone Steve Jobs and calm him down about the whole thing," he said.

"Anyway, we did this deal with Apple where we'd port some PC games to the Macintosh and help Peter Tamte create this company to do it, and I had to go to a Mac developer conference and get on stage and talk about this whole new partnership. It was a pretty strange time."

That company was Destineer, which ported Windows hits such as Age of Empires II and III, Tropico 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 over to the Apple platform, as well as Halo 1 itself, which saw a relatively speedy transition to Mac OS X.

Throughout the 90s Bungie released Mac hits such as the Marathon Trilogu and action game Oni.

The morale of this story? Don't mess with Steve Jobs. Even Microsoft doesn't seem that ballsy.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar ... ?id=271868

WTF?

Yeah, Marathon on the Mac... happy days. Level editor was pretty decent as well, I seem to recall. Spent a lot of teens building maps to shoot aliens with rocket launchers. It was good to have a Mac focused game developer who was producing good work. Then MS happened, and the rest is history. I can't blame Bungie, if someone arrived at my house with a big bag of money to let me do what I was already doing, I'd say yes as well.
The Destineer games are perhaps the best ported games on the platform, though.
Halo's a joy.

+1

God knows how many hours I've spent playing Halo. Always had a faint hope that Halo 2 and 3 might be ported but no go. Looks like I'll have to get an Xbox 360 then....I guess that's called being a late adopter.

I have both Xboxes and macs so not so worried about having a machine to play Halo on. Though as far as original games for macs that is another matter.

Apple was on the verge of buying Bungie

Apple narrowly missed out on buying Bungie as Microsoft struck a deal to acquire the developer at the eleventh hour.

That's according to Tuncer Deniz, who formerly served as a project lead at the Halo studio.

He told Develop that Bungie bosses "asked Apple if they were interested in buying us", only for CEO Steve Jobs to initially decline the offer.

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, then met with Jobs to further discuss the proposal.

"Schiller asked Steve, who said no," said Deniz. "[But] after a week, Steve said yes. Schiller calls Bungie, but Bungie had already consummated the deal with Microsoft."

Yesterday we reported that Jobs was "furious" when Microsoft announced the acquisition of Bungie back in 2000. Apple's boss allegedly had to be calmed down with the promise that the studio's Xbox games would be ported to Mac.

Apple currently has $51 billion in cash reportedly earmarked for "strategic opportunities", and has this week been tipped to buy Sony, EA and even Facebook.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar ... ?id=272095

Jobs, either a bit scatty behind the scenes, or a haggling genius