Apple Computer Inc wants to turn itself into a serious player in the games world and has "re-committed to the games market," interim CEO told MacWorld attendees in San Francisco on Tuesday. Jobs listed 12 games either already running on the Mac or to be launched within four months, including games from Activision Inc, Blizzard Entertainment, Bungie Software Inc, Electronic Arts/Maxis, GT Interactive Inc, iD Software Inc, Mindscape, Red Storm Entertainment Inc and Sierra Software Inc. The addition of the Rage 128 graphics processor and support for OpenGL graphics libraries is an incentive for the games industry, giving the Mac enough 3D graphics power and making it easier to support common code for games running on both PC and Mac platforms. Jobs invited the co-founder of iD Software, John Cormack, onto the stage to demonstrate the forthcoming Quake 3: Arena follow-up to 1998's Quake II, which is being simultaneously developed on the Mac and PC. "There's only 15k of Macintosh-specific code" said Cormack. "The only thing that's wrong is you want to take out the single button mouse and plug in a three button one". Meanwhile, Connectix Corp caused great excitement among games enthusiasts by launching the Virtual Game Station, a software program that emulates many games written for the Sony Playstation to run on the G3. It comes with ready-to-use support for the Mac keyboard and mouse, but also supports game pads and joysticks, and includes a menu screen from which users can define the functions of buttons on many games controllers. San Mateo-based Connectix - most famous for its RAM Doubler and Virtual PC software - says the software will work on any G3 Mac, including iMacs. It is priced at $49. The software is said to run about 80 of the 500 or so games available for the Playstation, and isn't yet shipping in stores, although it was on sale at MacWorld. Sony has not authorized the product, and the industry awaits to see if it will sue. Connectix appears to be gambling on the fact that the availability of the product will sell more games, which is how Sony makes most if its profits on the Playstation. Connectix is said to be working on a PC version of the product.

COPYRIGHT 1999 ComputerWire, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group