Steve Jobs Went Bananas When Microsoft Bought Halo’s Creators

Before Halo, Bungie had made a name for itself developing the Marathon series of shooters on the Mac. So when the studio was bought by Microsoft to make games for the Xbox, Apple boss Steve Jobs was pissed.

“As soon as we announced we bought Bungie, Steve Jobs called,” former Microsoft vice president of game publishing Ed Fries tells Develop.

“He was mad at [Microsoft CEO Steve]Ballmer and phoned him up and was angry because we’d just bought the premier Mac game developer and made them an Xbox developer.”

He was so mad, in fact, that he needed to be called and talked back from the outskirts of cranky town.

“…I got an email from Steve Ballmer asking me to phone Steve Jobs and calm him down about the whole thing,” Fries continues.

“Anyway, we did this deal with Apple where we’d port some PC games to the Macintosh and help Peter Tamte create this company to do it, and I had to go to a Mac developer conference and get on stage and talk about this whole new partnership. It was a pretty strange time.”

Strange and great. Jobs has always been known for his ability to back a winning product, but this shows he also knows a good game developer when he sees one. Then again, it also shows how Apple doesn’t care that much about gaming, or it would have bought Bungie itself.

Bungie of course has not only moved on from Apple, but from Microsoft too, signing a deal earlier this year with publisher Activision.

Steve Jobs ‘raged at Microsoft’ over game studio sale [Develop]
Republished from Kotaku