In a recent Game Room blog post Macworld's Peter Cohen analyzed id Software's continued support for the Mac platform, specifically looking at the recent demonstration of the idTech 5 game engine on Mac hardware. The article examined John Carmack's history with Macs and discussed the positive impact of a new game engine running natively in OS X.

As I said in an earlier post, Cider is a great push in the right direction—but it shouldn’t be the only one. Hopefully it’s only the first step in EA simultaneously developing products for the Mac the same way it does for other platforms.

idTech 5, meanwhile, does represent, effectively, original Mac game development. Carmack explained that the technology demo that Id will provide to E3 media attendees next month will use the same data set regardless of platform—that means that games using the engine could be developed for the Mac, PC, and game consoles simultaneously.

This isn’t the first time that Carmack has shared the stage with Jobs. Way back in 2001, Carmack visited the keynote stage of Macworld Expo in Tokyo, Japan. At that time it was to present a development version of the engine that would ultimately power Doom III—a game that finally did make it to the Mac, although there were delays.

Carmack’s interest in the Mac market is understandable. For one thing, he’s an experienced NextStep developer. NextStep is the operating system that Mac OS X owes its core foundation to, and Carmack used it to help develop the original Doom and Quake games.

Macworld Game Room: Quake Creator's Mac Support Should Be A Boon

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