Mac Gaming Gods: Graeme Devine
August 24, 2001 | Lucian Fong | | Pages: |  | 1 | 2 |  |
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Q: How did you get interested in Macs and how did that affect your direction as a programmer?A: Well, of course, there was the Apple IIe which was very different from everything else I had used up until that point. After that I fell into the Amiga/Atari ST camp for a bit until NeXT came along with the cube. I used that left right center for the longest time and made Trilobyte use it across the company (artists/reception/pr/programming) and this worked out EXTREMELY well. When I started at id, we had a pre-production G3 which I played around with. I had forgotten the ease of use factor in using a Mac and it made a natural for use with game design.
Q: A lot of Mac gamers are familiar with your enthusiasm and evangelism about the Mac at id, but not many know about past: you programmed Pole Position for Atari and founded Trilobyte, which developed The 7th Guest. Could you expand on your younger days a bit more?
A; I worked on all the various ports of Pole Position for Atari. At that time Atarisoft was making games for different computers than their own and selling them, and I was in that part of the company. It was fun, even up until the end because we produced games so quickly that the fun component of each game had to be very, very high. Trilobyte came much later and was basically a result of looking around the industry and saying "hey, this CD thing is going to take off... I bet if we make a CD game..."
Q: id has always been at the cutting edge when it comes to graphics engine development. Why the interest in producing top-notch sound?
A: Because there's more CPU available now for the processing. With previous games we pegged out the CPU 100% doing just the graphics, so the sounds were very bare. Today we've got CPUs capable of doing extremely high end sound on both faster and dual processor systems while the graphics get a boost from the graphics processor on the video board.
Q: Right now, Mac gaming seems to be at an all-time high, with many, many exciting titles on their way. Do you think the Mac market can support this massive influx of games? Will it ever reach a point of saturation?
A: Hmmm. I think Mac gamers are a different crowd than PC gamers, so a lot of it depends on the games. I think there is a huge market there for the right games.
Q: Do you see yourself being involved in [Mac] gaming as long as humanly possible? Or would you like to pursue other personal interests in the future?
A: I love working with Apple and on the Mac. I'm passionate about seeing Apple succeed further and show the world what computers should be doing.
Q: What do you like most about being a Mac user?
A: Trying to use a PC and then in the end using my Titanium [PowerBook G4] to do the job in less time.
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