There’s a Reuters article about iPhone games floating around. They interview the folks of PopCap, who have a few iPod games under their belt; GreyStripe, who does games with web ads; and EA, who doles out the money quotes like candy at a parade. From Travis Boatman, VP of Worldwide Mobile Games at EA:
“Apple wants to be focused on making sure the thing works as a core device.”
“The first few iPods didn’t support games but eventually they did.”
“We’re huge believers in the iPhone and believe that’s going to be a viable market going forward.”
“It has an amazing interface for games and there are lots of beautiful things you can do with that touch interface.”
I asked EA about iPhone games at ShowStoppers, part of CTIA, back in March. They were coy then, too; there had been a few reports of an agreement for games between EA and Apple even then. Needless to say, I was unable to drag any sort of official comment out of their spokesperson there. The tune he sung was to the gist of “if or when Apple puts games on it, we’ll be there.”
Fanboys aren’t the only ones wanting to install games on iPhone. Developers at Electronic Arts (EA) and PopCap, see iPhone as a viable gaming handheld and a potentially lucrative market. So much so in fact that the folks at PopCap aren’t waiting for Apple to open its walled garden to developers. The popular maker of mobile game titles says iPhone is already on its roadmap for future game development, and has a few projects in the works. Andrew Stein, PopCap’s director of mobile business development recently told Reuters…
“We don’t typically make announcements about what’s in the pipeline, but based on the success of ‘Bejeweled’, we’re looking pretty closely at the iPhone.”
EA echoed similar intentions. Travis Boatman, EA’s Vice President of worldwide studios for the mobile division (there’s a mouthful title, I’d hate to see this guys business card) said…
“We’re huge believers in the iPhone and believe that’s going to be a viable market going forward,” It has an amazing interface for games and there are lots of beautiful things you can do with that touch interface.”
The message here is clear - developers see iPhone as a platform, not a product. Unfortunately Apple still sees things being the other way round, at least publicly. An increasing number of anxious developers aren’t waiting for Apple’s answer, or SDK, and taking initiative. Applications are coming, with or without the blessing of Cupertino.
iPhone as a gaming device - it’s coming folks…slowly but surely.
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I noticed a new application is available for the iPhone today, Aquarium v.1.0.0. There’s a clown fish; if you tap the screen, a food pellet appears. The clownfish zooms towards the food, then just chills out. I know, it’s not too thrilling, but I think that’s the part of the poitn with aquarium type games. At any rate, it’s at least a start, like the Zune2 ‘whack-a-zune’ game. I think it will take a bit for the developers to get a handle on how to program well for the iPhone, since the barrier to entry is pretty high.
It looks like they’ve ported over a Z machine text adventure game interpreter, which means you can play Zork on your hacked iPhone.
It looks like the ‘Nintendo vs Apple’ stories are heating up. There are a few more stories today about the “war” that will be going on between the two.
It goes without saying that the results of this “war” will be interesting. Because to even have this war, Apple will need actual games on the iPhone. Besides LighgtsOut, now the 3rd game to claim the honor of ‘1st game on the iPhone’ (there’s also iPhoneDoom and the NES emulator) which showed up in the hacked iPhone’s Installer.app last night.
Oh Apple, how ever did you think you could keep developers from breaking down iPhone’s backdoor. Hmm? Not only have developers managed to find their way inside, knocking over lamps as they stumble in the dark, but one developer created a rather illuminating piece of software. meniacal laugh
Lights Off is the first, that we know of, “unofficial” game for iPhone. The first of many perhaps. The goal of this simple puzzle game is to switch off all the little blinking lights in order to advance levels. Installing this code isn’t for the faint of heart. It involves a bit of rubber chicken swinging and poking through iPhone’s hidden file system. Full instructions are on the site.
Don’t forget to turn out the Lights! Heh heh. Get it? Lights? Turn out…with the…oh never mind.
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Figure 1: A family-oriented Disney-themed multiplayer iPhone Game where you use laser-shooting iPhones to burn forests and kill Bambi.
I’ll admit, it’s a wholly speculative article. There really isn’t much in terms of content. It should probably be on Page 2 of Macrumors, the place where speculative rumors go. But it’s not there. It pits Apple against Nintendo, when there could just as easily be a partnership.
I’m not sure I even believe the New York Post article that says Nintendo is going to use a new accelerometer DS as a controller for a Wii.
But I’d love to be wrong. I’d love to be wrong by January. [another great Jesus Diaz photoshop]
Several
sites
have
been
reporting
the presence of strings about gaming (perhaps slightly less exciting are the strings about voice memos and Nike+iPod, no one is reporting about those) in a localizable.strings file found by download squad. But what do those localizable strings really mean?
Well, as Engadget notes, strings like that are all over the place. A lot of it is just copy-and-pasted code from other devices, as noted by Arn of MacRumors. Arn checked his history, and noted that the same text appears in the Apple TV localized strings, from iTunes 7.1, way back in March, and you know what? Still no games there either.
The following is taken from a June 29th post on Apple Insider:
/* ===== Mobile Phone Strings ===== /
…
“4301.136″ = “Sending workout data to nikeplus.com…”;
“4301.137″ = “Downloading Nike+iPod voice kit…”;
“4301.138″ = “Installing Nike+*iPod voice kit…”;
“4301.079″ = “The mobile phone “^1” contains new voice memos.
Would you like to move these voice memos to your
iTunes library?”;
“4320.300″ = “iTunes has detected a Macintosh-formatted iPhone.
You must restore this iPhone before you can use it
on Windows.”;
/* ===== iPhone Game Item Strings ===== */
“4329.001″ = “Are you sure you want to remove the selected game
from your iPhone?”;
“4329.002″ = “Are you sure you want to remove the selected games
from your iPhone?”;
This isn’t to say that I hope games don’t arrive on the iPhone. Au contraire, mes freres et mes soeurs, I dearly hope they arrive. But I don’t expect their arrival based from programmer strings in a localised file. I’ll wait for them, and hope for high-profile leaks and actual product announcements instead.
figure 1: the meat of the interface. run support, it’s always nice.
Though there aren’t any applications you can install on the iPhone, there are a lot of web apps that can be run. One of those finer web apps of which I’m fond is Pickleview. Pickleview is a web app that gives you real-time updates on what’s going on with your team, or any of the games that are playing, and in real time.
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Get your gaming finger ready (no, not THAT one), iPhone fanboys. Word on the street says Apple is prepping the iPhone for gaming support. This coming from DownloadSquad in the UK, while perusing the latest update to iTunes looking for hidden gold, uncovered these two curious strings buried in the code…
/* ===== iPhone Game Item Strings ===== */
"4329.001" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected game from your iPhone?";
"4329.002" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected games from your iPhone?";
Interesting, no? Don’t go running outside in your boxers just yet, because we don’t know exactly what kind of games these might be. Are they native applications, fully hardware optimized, or lamo Flash-based games made possible by future Adobe Flash plugin support? We still won’t know that until Apple plays its hand.
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