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Apple Businesses Entertainment Games

Apple Offers Huge Prizes For Video Game Ports 81

Posted by Zonk from the more-than-just-minesweeper dept.
Oculus Habent writes "In an attempt to increase Apple's market share in the home sector, Steve Jobs announced today that he would personally fund prizes for ports of popular gaming titles to the Macintosh platform. Citing the common complaint of lack of game availability for Mac OS X, Jobs suggests that work in this area could seriously improve Macintosh acceptance. Said Jobs, "We've got incredible, stylish computers and an insanely great operating system. The Mac mini made has a huge impact, but it is only the tip of the iceberg." Prizes include Steve's yearly salary for the first ten ports, and twice that amount for "hot new titles" with a simultaneous release." Update: 04/02 18:02 GMT by Z : April 1st hoax story.
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Apple Offers Huge Prizes For Video Game Ports More

Apple Offers Huge Prizes For Video Game Ports

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  • Plausible? (Score:4, Funny)

    by numbski ( 515011 ) * <numbski@hksPASCA ... t minus language> on Friday April 01, 2005 @10:39AM (#12110801) Homepage Journal
    Yes.

    Likely? No.

    I'm sitting on top of a first post opportunity with nothing to say. Wow.

  • Ahh April 1st! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BlueFashoo ( 463325 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @10:40AM (#12110810)
    Are there going to be any real posts today?

  • prime stake (Score:5, Funny)

    by hunterx11 ( 778171 ) <hunterx11@noSpaM.gmail.com> on Friday April 01, 2005 @10:40AM (#12110813) Homepage Journal
    This one is almost believable. If they want to make an April Fools joke, they should post a story: "Slashdot Institutes New System to Prevent Dupes."
  • /. April fools day begins.

  • Stop the insanity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Drunken_Jackass ( 325938 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @10:41AM (#12110820) Homepage
    $1 to the first editor that stops posting April Fools articles. One i can handle, all of them is rediculous...again.
    • I think the lack of posting shows general agreement from the community.

      This is the annual day of beating an idea to death done by media types. Fortunately, no news happens on April 1 so they are free to show us how clever they are all day.
    • The one day of the year I don't read /.

      {got ya!}
    • "$1 to the first editor that stops posting April Fools articles. One i can handle, all of them is rediculous...again."

      Slashdot posts stories every single f'ing day of the year except April 1st. You've got 3 options:

      1.) Accept it and laugh.
      2.) Use this ONE day to not bother with Slashdot.
      3.) Bitch about it like a whiney brat.

  • I'm on it. right now.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @10:42AM (#12110826)
    I've got a screwdriver and am removing the joystick and power adaptor ports from my old Sega Genesis right now. I wonder if old Gameboy link adaptors count as "game ports" for this contest?

    I have no idea what they will do with all these millions of ports everyone will mail them. I suppose we will get some sort of iMac in the future bristling with all kinds of game control ports.

  • Steve's yearly salary is 1$ (Score:3, Informative)

    by acomj ( 20611 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @10:42AM (#12110828) Homepage
    Really.. The rest is just options...

    • If (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AtariAmarok ( 451306 )
      "Steve's yearly salary is 1$"

      Since "$1" is pronounced "one dollar", is "1$" pronounced "dollar one"?

      • Since "$1" is pronounced "one dollar", is "1$" pronounced "dollar one"?

        No, its pronounced £0.53 or 0.78 :-)

        My question is why Americans insist on calling the '#' pound when it looks nothing like '£'? I know what it is called, anyone else know?

        • Octothorpe, I believe, is the proper name for #. And I don't know why people call it 'pound' either.

        • Re:If (Score:1)

          by torpor ( 458 )
          Its called an octothorpe, or a hash. I say hash .. octhothorpe is far too freakin' ridiculous, 'pound' is a confusing concept entirely to most yanks, and besides it looks like a hash.. [wikipedia.org]
        • "My question is why Americans insist on calling the '#' pound when it looks nothing like '£'? I know what it is called, anyone else know? "

          No idea. I was raised as an American to call that the "number sign". It took quite a while to get used to someone calling it a "pound sign". No idea where it came from. They should go back to calling it a number sign because as you said there already is that L-like thing which is a pound sign and ONLY a pound sign.

          • On American keyboards, # is shift-3, which is pound on UK keyboards (right?)

            just a completely random observation
            • "On American keyboards, # is shift-3, which is pound on UK keyboards (right?)"

              Then, what is Shift-4 on the UK keyboard? Is it still $ like on the US keyboard? Also, if there is nota # on the UK keyboard, what do you use for number-sign, like if you want to type "#1, #2, #3"? Do you have to type "No. 1, No. 2"? Or nothing at all?

              • Shift-4 is $ in the UK [btopenworld.com]. They also switch " and @ so to type a " you press shift-2 and to type a @ you press shift-' (which is weird)
                • My old C=64 had the " as shift-2 also.. I remember because I broke that key off due to incessant repeated typing of LOAD "*",8,1.

                  Ah memories..

                • They also switch " and @ so to type a " you press shift-2 and to type a @ you press shift-' (which is weird)

                  It sounds like the layout many old typewriters and pre-IBM personal computers used (with " above 2, the parentheses above 8 and 9 instead of 9 and 0, etc), as did the famous ASR33 teletype :-). Japanese computer keyboards still use it.

                  I think the basic layout of current american keyboards came from the IBM selectric typewriter (at least that's the first place I recall seeing it).
          • I live in the US (Minnesota, specifically), and I remember it as the number sign, or possibly a hash mark. When I was in 3rd grade, a friend of mine got an answering machine that supported multiple mailboxes, and to differentiate, you have to push #, then the mailbox number during the message. His dad set it up to say "to leavea a private message for Rick, press pound 1, for Andy, press pound 2..." I did what I thought it said, and it still went to the general mailbox. I tried it a couple of times, but

        • My question is why Americans insist on calling the '#' pound when it looks nothing like '£'? I know what it is called, anyone else know?

          To all those who answered 'octothorp' well done! Personally I just call it 'hash' as do others. Certainly not 'pound'. I remember way back in the late 70's when I first started using computers the keyboards often didn't have a £ symbol so it was common to use the # as an alternative. I wonder if that is the source of calling it 'pound'?

        • According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Number Sign is the prefered unicode name for the glyph, but it notes further in the entry that:

          [The # sign is] used as the symbol for the pound avoirdupois in the U.S. (where lb. would be used in the UK and Canada; note that lb. or lbs. is common in the U.S. as well and is used by the general public more often than #). Never called "pound" in the UK, where the term denotes the pound sterling and its symbol (£).

          Keith Gordon Irwin in, The Romance of Writing, p. 125 says: "

      • According to my Perl Prof. $1 is pronounced "dollar one".
    • According to the second article linked, he doesn't even have the options any more either, as of March 2003.

  • Lame (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    a) No link to the actual story.

    b) Steve Jobs makes $1/year as CEO.

    c) This is getting gay.

    • Re:Lame (Score:2, Funny)

      by numbski ( 515011 ) *
      Which is more lame, the story, or the fact that you knew Steve Jobs' salary off the top of your head? :p
      • I think the fact that you didn't realize the linked article is about Steve Jobs' salary is probably the most lame indeed.

        -9mm-
  • Hmmm...no link to an actual news story about the announcement...yet another April Fools story, and if you RTFA you will discover Steve's yearly salary is $1.

  • Enemy Territory (Score:3, Informative)

    by Captain Splendid ( 673276 ) <capsplendidNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday April 01, 2005 @10:53AM (#12110982) Homepage Journal
    In happier (and non-fooling) news, Enemy Territory [4players.de], my favorite free online game, just released a Mac version, which you can find here [4players.de].

    Anybody wishing help playing the game or finding decent servers to play on are more than welcome to contact me. My friends and I love this game and are always willing to help new blood.

  • Come on people (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ghetto_D ( 670850 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @11:12AM (#12111155)
    I'm willing to offer Jobs' salary to anyone that posts an actually funny April Fools joke.

    links to examples:
    http://www.google.com/googlegulp/ [google.com]
    http://homestarrunner.com/ [homestarrunner.com]
    http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/icopulate.shtml [thinkgeek.com]

  • Steve job's salary for the first 10 points. $10!

    Pretty nifty april fools

  • Cryin' Shame (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kniLnamiJ-neB ( 754894 )
    You know, Apple really OUGHT to do this. I was a Mac fanboy for a long time, until all my friends started playing Windows games that weren't released on the Mac or were released 8 months later, when nobody I knew played them any more. Sure it's a stupid April Fools' joke, but if they actually DID this it might be the smartest thing they've done since ITunes.
    • I agree that if the Mac at least made a decent showing in the game department that it would increase my likliness of buying one by about ten fold, but I think a cash incentive program could never make sense.

      It'd have to be a big enough incentive to practically pay for the development costs of the mac version since the reason companies don't develop their games for the mac is because it's just not nearly as profitable to spend time on doing so.

      Kinda like how theatre companies close down theatres that are t

  • Even though it may mean a huge increase in market share, I don't think Apple will ever want their computers to be known as "good gaming platforms".

    Mac = time spent "productivly"

    Windows = playing video games, downloading pr0n

    Of course the two are not completely mutually exclusive, you can be productive on Windows and waste time on a Mac, but this is the general path of their evolution.

    Windows evolution = appeal to the masses, give them what they want, get huge market share

    Apple evolution = damn the

    • Unless the office is out of control and people are playing games all the time, I really don't think it makes sense to say Macs are more productive inherently simply because they have fewer games.

      Based on my experience, in your typical office environment, the web and instant messaging are responsible for around 95% of time wasted, and games would be around 0.2%.

      I know the occasional office will have gaming problems with a subset of people, but I havn't seen anything bad since the height of the boom.
      • Based on my experience, in your typical office environment, the web and instant messaging are responsible for around 95% of time wasted, and games would be around 0.2%.

        Good point, I agree. That really made me stop and think because I was really looking at this from the point of view of what you do with a computer on your own time, at home during the evenings if you work a daytime office job.

    • I don't think Apple will ever want their computers to be known as "good gaming platforms".

      You're wrong. They've released 2 updates to Panther with the bulk of the listed features being improvements to World of Warcraft compatibility. If they didn't care about appearing to make a good gaming machine, they probably wouldn't have bothered working with Blizzard to optimize for their game, and they certainly wouldn't have emphasized those "features" over other improvements they made in the releases, some of w

      • Apple would love to be taken seriously by more game manufacturers.

        Sure they would. If the big gaming houses would release mac versions of all their big titles, at the same time as windows versions are released, that would probably mean more users and increased marketshare and revenue for Apple. But it's just never been a top priority with Apple to make this happen, and I don't see it being one anytime soon. It's just not what they're about.

        But don't listen to me if you don't want to. It's just my op

    • People who actually do work on computers tend to get stuff done, regradless of OS. Gamers, OTOH, do not.

  • If this is an AFJ, it's a pretty lame one - as if Microsoft came out and said "Hey everyone, we admit our security sucks...just kidding!! They'd just be faced with a sea of blank stares and incredulous expressions.

    Because this actually falls into Apple's unfortunate historic pattern of aborted game support. Every once in a while, Jobs announces a huge game initiative, how it will be the new center of the Mac plaform (remember Game Sprockets?). Back in the day when I worked in the industry, we met Apple's

  • Photoshop (Score:3, Funny)

    by IntergalacticWalrus ( 720648 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @01:46PM (#12113027)
    We at Adobe are waiting for our check.
  • Sign me up!
  • C'mon! This was funny.

    What amazes me is all the grumpy posters ragging about how juvenile slashdot is EVERY year. On the SAME day. Like this is some sort of surprise. Whose the April Fool here? Honestly.

    If you know slashdot is going to be "lame" today, why do you bother dropping by? Isn't it a waste of your time? You can't skip reading slashdot even one day? I can't think of a worse waste of time than visiting sites where I hate the content and trolling about how lame everything is.

    Personally

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