At least 95% of the interviews were conducted by email. I did a few over the phone, and a handful over the years were done in person, including one with Mark Rein at MWSF several years ago. (Before I could sit down with him, I had to follow him around the show floor as he tried out various printers and then spent some time at the Apple booth berating an employee for their lack of multi-button mice. That was, um, uncomfortable.)
RE my associations with MacPlay and Virtual Programming: No, that never caused any issues. I was always upfront about it and let the folks at Aspyr, Feral, MacSoft, et al know about it, in case they had an issue, but no one ever did. They trusted me to treat them fairly, especially since I was writing feature articles, not reviews. Also, my time with MacPlay was pretty brief, and I only started with VP in early 2010, so during most of my 10.5 years writing for Apple Games, I didn't have any potential conflicts of interest.
I had never seen that Think Brilliant post until now. It's a shame that people trashed the layout of that page. The guy who maintained it is a great guy who I worked with for at least 9 out of those 10.5 years. The problem was that he was the only person assigned to laying out the site, and there was no desire to put additional resources into it. As we all know, Apple has only paid token attention to games for years (until now, at least on iOS), so apple.com/games received minimal support internally. Like I said, there were corporate politics involved that I only had a glimpse into, since I was a contractor. I won't get into them, though, because there's no sense in airing anyone's dirty laundry.
I seriously doubt the look of Apple Games was what brought it down. If someone was unhappy with the layout, they could have replaced the guy who was handling it, or added one or two people to work on it and bring it up to par with the rest of the site. In fact, when they added the iPod Games section (covering the clickwheel iPod games), it took forever to finally get approval, and even then no additional resources were put into it, so the same guy had to deal with that too.
In fact, they had an editor on apple.com/games too, but after the second one moved on several years ago, they didn't bother to replace her, so there was no editorial oversight. It was just me and the layout guy, which on one hand was great because I had zero editorial interference (and even when there was an editor on the site, the interference was barely above zero), but on the other hand, I guess it should have been a signal that they had very little interest in putting resources into the site, and it was only a matter of time before it was axed.
Yeah, it still depresses me that it's gone. Ah well.
ltcommander.data, on 19 July 2011 - 09:19 PM, said:
It really is too bad that the Apple Games page is gone. It was a great resource to see virtually all the major games ported to Mac, plus the inclusion of developer interviews and comments made the articles more interesting than the standard review seen elsewhere. Where you actually able to sit down with most developers to go through the game together for your articles or were they mostly done via email? If you really did have in person access to all those developers, it most have been a very interesting job. Was there ever any tension with other porting houses when you wrote articles about their games given your association with Virtual Programming and previously MacPlay?
http://www.thinkbril...09/apple-games/
I wonder if this had anything to do with the website's closure? It wouldn't surprise me if even though the content was great, Apple brought down the hammer simply because someone didn't like the look of the page.
It's too bad these game articles couldn't be integrated into the Mac App Store. For example, featured games could include these articles by Apple to give additional, objective information on the game beyond just the publisher's promotion page.
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