Destineer president Peter Tamte’s Mac game brand, Bold, is responsible for Age of Empires II, Links Championship Edition and forthcoming titles including Halo and Dungeon Siege. Recently Tamte talked with Macworld UK’s Jonny Evans about his company, its products and the state of the Mac market.
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Tamte said with Jaguar out, now’s a good time for gamers to upgrade to Mac OS X, even if his company hasn’t yet decided whether Halo will be OS X 10.2-only. He also downplayed reports of friction between Apple and Microsoft — his company produces Mac versions of Microsoft games, and he said that he’s “seen no shred of evidence” to suggest that Microsoft is worried about Apple.
On porting games to the Mac, Tamte called 90 percent of the delays porting products to the Mac as avoidable when PC developers follow some good practices. “They should avoid using functions in the PC compiler that don’t work on a Mac, and should also avoid using PC APIs with no Mac equivalent. Additionally, they should focus on creating clean, C-compliant code,” he said.
Tamte also waxed philosophically on violence in games. He said that focusing on violence in games as a reason why people are violent in real life gives the public “a false sense of security,” and added that his opportunity as a game publisher is “to create games that go beyond that, games with deeper reflections on life and culture.”
Tamte also offers his opinions of new technology, the future of digital rights management as it applies to games, and more.