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Steve Jobs Got Mad After Microsoft Bought Bungie
Posted By: poenadareDate: 7/11/11 7:57 a.m.

Didn't know this. Interesting.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/steve-jobs-bungie-halo-msft,news-8473.html

Steve Jobs Got Mad After Microsoft Bought Bungie

Bungie Studios, before they were known for the Halo series, was a dedicated Mac games developer with classics such as Marathon.

The game developer was working on a great-looking title called Halo for both the PC and Mac – that is, until Microsoft swooped in and acquired the developer to make them an exclusive Xbox games maker.

This pained both PC and Mac gamers (especially Mac gamers), but it also hit Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

In an interview with Develop, Ed Fries, the former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft, revealed that he had to call Steve Jobs and appease him with a game development deal to make-up for snatching Bungie away from the Mac.

“As soon as we announced we bought Bungie, Steve Jobs called,” Fries said. “He was mad at [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer and phoned him up and was angry because we’d just bought the premier Mac game developer and made them an Xbox developer.”

“So, during the day, I got an email from Steve Ballmer asking me to phone Steve Jobs and calm him down about the whole thing,” he added. “Anyway, we did this deal with Apple where we’d port some PC games to the Macintosh and help Peter Tamte create this company to do it, and I had to go to a Mac developer conference and get on stage and talk about this whole new partnership. It was a pretty strange time.”

Of course, that's ancient history now, and Bungie's divorced itself from Microsoft only to find a new partner at Activision. The lasting effect seems to be that Bungie is now a console game developer rather than for the platforms with keyboards and mice.

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Replies:

Steve Jobs Got Mad After Microsoft Bought Bungiepoenadare 7/11/11 7:57 a.m.
     Not new, but still funny in a painful kind of way *NM*Bob-B-Q 7/11/11 8:04 a.m.
     Re: Steve Jobs Got Mad After Microsoft Bought BungHippieman 7/11/11 10:34 a.m.

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