Games! They're the driving force behind the consumer personal computer market. Sure, people claim they need a computer to run Quicken and bring home work from the office, but it's really all about games. So is it any wonder that Apple trails in the race for consumer market share? The iMac's giving them a boost, no doubt, but the simple fact still stands that many, many more games exist for the Wintel platform. And we're not just talking about the loads of shovelware DOS-based crap that no one would want to play anyway; while there's definitely plenty of that, many of the best games out for personal computers aren't out for the Mac. Games like Half-Life, Quake II, and stuff like that. That's the bad news. The good news is that Apple has been doing something about the whole game disparity issue.

First of all, there's the iMac itself. Apple sold 800,000 of the little blue wonders between August 15th and December 31st, and it was the best-selling computer in November. Therefore, the Mac installed base is growing, and games publishers are starting to take notice. But Apple didn't stop there. Two mega-huge announcements during the Expo keynote mean big, big things for the Mac as a gaming platform (and therefore as a consumer computing platform). The first is Connectix's new Virtual Game Station product, the Playstation emulator first reported by Apple Insider. For only $49, iMac owners can buy themselves the capability to play some 1200 Playstation games right on their iMac screens. If somebody ships a USB Playstation-style controller, the iMac may turn into a kick-butt gaming system overnight.

And though the Playstation emulator is huge news, it's the second surprise that may have the bigger impact on Mac gaming in the long run. Apple has officially licensed OpenGL from SGI. For the uninitiated, OpenGL is a set of programming interfaces for 3D development. It's the closest thing to an industry standard that's out there right now. Apple has pledged to support OpenGL at the operating system level, and while that may not sound like a big deal, trust us-- it is. John Carmack of id software (and the creator of Doom and Quake) actually took the stage during the keynote to announce that Quake 3 (Arena) will ship for the Macintosh. This is a well-respected (though not always well-liked) man in the games development community, who in the past has publicly stated that the Mac OS is "crusty" and "Apple doesn't have their 3D act together at all." His very public endorsement of the Mac OS and Apple's final choice to embrace OpenGL could herald a whole new era of Mac games development-- not just late ports of Wintel best-sellers. And on behalf of those of use who were expecting an announcement about Apple licensing OpenGL at last year's Expo, we can only say, it's about time.