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Macworld's Peter Cohen recently penned a new editorial examining the iPhone's potential as a mobile gaming platform. Citing early efforts of game developers to make use of Apple's portable phone, Cohen sees a bright future for iPhone gaming in the mobile phone market.

Despite an enormous amount of energy in mobile gaming over the last several years, it’s really been a tag-along to the console gaming market, however. Most phones are still very limited in processing capability and storage capacity, which has really constrained how detailed and how good these games can get. They’re often very poor imitations of their console counterparts, or backwards games that remind players a lot more of 15-year-old Game Boy titles than they do of something you’d expect to play in 2008.

From all indications I’m seeing in the developer community, the iPhone is going to shake things up in the mobile gaming market very dramatically. Its support of OpenGL ES, a 3-D graphics API, OpenAL, a positional sound API, and its basis in Cocoa development make the iPhone a keen platform for developers who are accustomed to modern computers and consoles. Developers don’t have to jump through the same hoops they’d have to developing for other phones. That’s why EA was able to get Spore running on the iPhone, as it demonstrated a few months ago when Apple unveiled the iPhone SDK. Sega did the same thing with its Super Monkey Ball game. And that only scratches the surface—there’s a ton of original game development coming down the pipe for iPhone as well.

Macworld: A Game Changer For Phone Games

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