So why haven’t there been more games on the Mac in the past? There have been many factors throughout the years that have crippled Mac gaming. I will not go into all of them right now as this post will become long winded. Instead I will focus on what is helping Mac gaming.

As you know last week was E3. Their were several announcements that I am very excited about, but one announcement stood out for me. Gears of War and UT3 coming to the Mac. If you couple this with the recent news that EA, id back gaming on the Mac from WWDC this is big news.

Epic is the company behind Gears of War and UT3. All of their games run on their proprietary Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is also used in many of the top games on the market. This port of their engine over to the mac will help other game developers who are using Unreal Engine make their games for the Mac. Something I am very excited about. id has also made a new game engine called"id tech 5". This will bring their new game and also pave the way for others to use their engine for Mac game development. EA has taken different approach to porting their games by relying on TransGaming Technologies and the Cider portability engine. Here is how it works.

Cider is a sophisticated portability engine that allows Windows games to be run on Intel Macs without any modifications to the original game source code. Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs. Games are "wrapped" with the Cider engine and they simply run on the Mac. This means developers have only one code base to maintain while enjoying the flexibility of targeting multiple platforms and, therefore, multiple revenue streams. Cider powered games use the same copy protection, lobbies, game matching and connectivity as the original Windows game. All this means less effort and lower costs. Cider is targeted to game developers and publishers.

Another credit for the recent attraction to Mac gaming to Apple’s move away from IBM’s Power PC Processors and move to Intel based processors. This move has been great for the Mac community as a whole. I personally run windows on my Mac through Parallels at work. This has really be a help for people who work in a windows dominant PC environment, to have the best of both worlds. This is all due to the move to Intel processors. Many Mac gamers with Intel processors also turn to Apple’s Boot Camp to to run their games at full system capacity. For this same reason we are seeing more and more people move to Mac’s since they are able to run several OS’s on one machine.

There was the announcement that Apple tied Gateway for third in US PC shipments. This is huge news as Gateway sales are on the decline and Mac sales are on the up-rise. Apple is poised to take 3rd place next year if things keep going the way they have been. Leopard is shipping soon and we will see another bump in Mac sales around christmas.