Mumbo Jumbo Games co-founder Mark Dochtermann, who previously worked on games at Ritual Entertainment including SiN and Heavy Metal: FAKK2, is now participating in the original development of Myth III: The Wolf Age and Mac ports of titles such as Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. Mark took a moment to share his thoughts on Mac OS X as a gaming platform just three days before its worldwide release.

MacNN: Many game developers have complained that they still lack the necessary SDKs and other materials to carbonize their games or otherwise bring them to Mac OS X. Is this also the case for you, and do you think Apple has made a mistake in still not supplying game developers with the necessary tools to bring these titles to the new platform?

Mark Dochtermann: Historically, early adopters of an operating system are professional users not recreational users. The fact that the March 24th version of OS X does not have all the necessary tools to bring all games to the platform right now is no great surprise. Apple plans to start shipping all their new hardware with OS X by mid summer. It is safe to say that by this time, not only will Apple have all the necessary tools to bring all games to the OS X platform but that there will also be quite a few games available for both OS X and OS 9 right out of the box.

If you are going to be buying OS X to play games in the short term, you are probably better off staying with OS 9. Running Macintosh games in Classic mode will probably be slower than running them under OS 9. If you wait until Apple rolls out OS X with all new hardware, the gaming outlook will be much better and the transition will be that much smoother. With that said, companies like Id Software, Omni Group, and Mumbo Jumbo are already successfully developing games for the OS X platform. While there are holes in the current toolset, the OS is already shaping up to be a premier gaming platform.

by MacNN Staff