> Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive?
Where the hell did you hear that?
In any event, it isn’t true. Quake 3 was released shortly after Jobs was turning them around from circling the drain. They’re lucky somebody was porting it at all.
Yep for 3 days before Linux! And then most of the later betas were Windows only.
It wasn’t the final full featured release of Quake III though.
And as stated in Carmacks .plan it was because these gaming communities were so tiny so I’m not sure this is a strong argument for the macs viability as a gaming platform, which was the context of this thread.
I guess in a technical way that counts as a very brief Mac exclusive..
Maybe he was thinking of Halo? Originally shown at a MacWorld Expo as a Mac exclusive then very shortly thereafter Bungie was bought out by Microsoft (obviously turning it into an XBox exclusive), leading to much outcry among the Mac faithful. But it was never actually released in playable form on the Mac.
I think you’re reaching a bit. I’m aware of this. Most of all because what this article doesn’t mention is that q3test was also initially released for Linux before Windows and you better believe that was a huge deal on slashdot at the time. The beta was basically a Mac OS exclusive for 3 days. (I admittedly was quite the Linux fanboy then but even I think calling this a Linux/Mac exclusive for the first “alpha” as they said in the readme silly as compared to something like Myst or Oregon Trail)
It was also like a week and change gap for Windows. And then the later beta releases were Windows only. The final Mac release ended up being delayed until after Christmas.
Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive?