Apple announced recently that iPhone and iPod users had downloaded an impressive one billion programs from the company’s online App Store in a mere nine months. Meanwhile, 15 of the 20 most popular paid downloads since the service opened have been games.
These two facts are not unrelated. Apple hasn’t been this relevant in video games — and video games have not been so relevant to Apple — since the early 1980s, when the Apple II was a major platform for computer games.
It is about time. Even as Apple has spent most of the past 25 years trying to cast itself as the creative, youthful alternative to dour, dowdy Microsoft, it is Microsoft that has become a dominant power in video games, through both the Xbox and Windows. By contrast, Apple has historically acted as if it were embarrassed to be associated with gamers.
I should know, because I was a Macintosh loyalist who tried to hold out as top game after top game went to PCs, only arriving on the Mac months or years later, if ever. I finally capitulated about 10 years ago and bought my first Windows computer.
So when I heard last summer that Apple was extolling the iPhone’s new ability to download games, I was skeptical, skittish and fearful of being burned by Apple again. Yet by this spring, the buzz in the industry about the potential for iPhone games had become so strong — with some evangelists for Apple claiming that the iPhone is a better game machine than even Nintendo’s hugely popular DS line — that I submitted to the hype and got an iPhone.
After carrying it around for several weeks, a few things are clear. At its best, the iPhone delivers a casual, often delightful, frequently whimsical gaming experience. Most of the best iPhone games,…