This is the first time you've heard the shooter Serious Sam mentioned on our news page, but with any luck it won't be the last. When this first-person shooter with Doom-like gameplay and a next-generation graphics engine hit the streets on the PC side a few days ago, it received many accolades for putting the speed, mayhem and madness back into the genre. With hordes of enemies, a powerful arsenal and a definite sense of humor, this title by a small Croatian development company has been an instant hit -- and of course we want to see it on the Mac OS.

A visit to the Croteam web site reveals that their engine is built upon OpenGL as a foundation and the networking is straight TCP/IP; there are no closed Microsoft technologies standing between a port of their engine to the Mac OS. The publisher for Serious Sam is Gathering of Developers, a strong Mac OS supporter in the past; combine these factors and this game warranted some serious investigation.

IMG contacted Croteam and spoke with several staff members. While we didn't get a definite answer, we did find some good news to report. Here is the reply we got from lead programmer Alen Ladavac:

Our stance is that we would like to make our engine as portable as possible.
And Mac is, together with Linux, one of the first two platforms to think
about when we are speaking of game portability. Unfortunately, we are still
a very small developer and that is why we were not able to allocate
resources for any porting or crossplatform development. I believe, however
that this situation will change in the future.

Gathering of Developers

Croteam/Serious Sam Web Site

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