Back when I was in college -- way back in early 1997, I'm afraid -- I wrote a well-reasoned letter to the online arm of Ultra Game Players magazine in defense of Nintendo, whose star was starting to take on a distinct tinge of tarnish among the nascent online hardcore gaming fanbase. The N64's strong launch had deteriorated into the likes of Yoshi's Story, with little but Star Fox 64 and the far-distant Ocarina of Time to look forward to for the foreseeable future. But that's okay, I argued; Nintendo has always employed the same model as Apple Computer, whose Macintosh suffered from the same problems as the N64 -- an expensive proprietary format, relatively sparse releases, an insular corporate culture -- but also offered the same ultimate benefit: powerful hardware and quality software.
"Yeah, but Apple sucks," was the website's thoughtful response. Fortunately, I can take some pleasure in knowing that history has lent weight to my comparison, with Nintendo seemingly aping Apple at every turn since then. Apple makes colorful computers and a laptop in translucent blue or orange with white accents; Nintendo unveils N64s in the same color, along with its upcoming Game Boy Advance hardware in translucent blue or orange with white accents. Apple makes a compact, cube-shaped computer that founders in the marketplace; Nintendo follows with a compact, cube-shaped console that founders in the marketplace. Nintendo's current systems, the DS and Wii, want so badly to be Mac hardware it's not even funny. Where Apple leads, Nintendo seems to follow in lockstep.
But for the first time, perhaps Apple would do well to learn from its imitator. They've suddenly decided that video gaming is the future -- a distinct change of pace for a company whose boss deliberately pushed the Macintosh platform away from gaming for fear that the ability to have fun on Macs would lend credence to the view that the system was a toy next to its stodgy, command-line-driven competition. Aside from the occasional bit of MacWorld keynote lip-service -- look, it's John Carmack! And he's playing Quake III on an iMac! -- Apple's relationship with gaming has largely been one of disinterest, with a few stalwarts like Blizzard, Freeverse, Ambrosia, Pangaea, and Spiderweb keeping the home fires burning for those few Mac gamers who haven't given up and installed Boot Camp.
But now Apple has a powerful portable computing device running Mac OS X in the form of the iPhone, along with a homegrown content delivery service in the iTunes Store. Not surprisingly, someone added two and two and came up with the realization that gaming should be Apple's next big initiative. It makes sense; the iPhone is proving to be a runaway success even as iPod sales reach the inevitable point of saturation, and power players in both the movie and music industries are doing their best to keep Apple from muscling any further onto their turf. Games, on the other hand, are wide-open territory, and the iPhone is a tempting platform for developers; the App Store averages 2 million downloads a day, and there are dozens of Cinderella stories of amateur programmers like Trism's Steve Detemer making a fortune on a single homebrew creation. Unsurprisingly, when Apple released the revised iPod Touch a few months ago -- effectively an iPhone minus the phone -- they called it "the funnest iPod ever" and made a lot of noise about how many games are available for the platform.
