half-life-mac posts

Valve generated a lot of hype for its decision earlier this year to port a number of its more recent games like Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and the Left 4 Dead games to the Mac platform. But that's still not the case for some of its older games including the original Half-Life game. But the truth is that there was plans to release a Mac port of Valve's debut game in 1999. In fact it was nearly complete before the game's original publisher, Sierra, pulled the plug.

That's the story told by Rebecca Heineman, who worked on the programming of the port for Logicware. In a new and extensive interview at Gamasutra she states, "We were about three weeks from master. We just had some minor bugs here and there, just a little polish needed to be done." Then pre-order sales numbers came in from stores that totaled about 50,000 copies. While that was huge for Mac games in 1999 that wasn't good enough for Sierra who made the decision to cancel the Mac port. Despite pleas from other publishers that they would publish the port, Sierra also said, "No" to those requests. Heineman states, "As a result, we were told to take the code and bury it. And it's been buried away since."

[Via Blue's News]

It's taken a long, long time but today Valve, after sending out some very clear hints earlier last week, made it official. They will finally be releasing native Mac versions for their library of games, including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series. It will also offer a native Mac version of its Steam client. Both the games and Steam will be released for the Mac sometime in April. There's no word yet on what other games offered on Steam will be released in their Mac versions

In addition to their previous games, Valve will also release their next game, Portal 2, for the Mac and it will be released at the same time as its PC version. Valve will also offer its Steamworks game development tools for the Mac which means Mac games will be able to support Steam achievements, leaderboards and the Steam Cloud features. Mac and Windows gamers will be able to play each other online as well. Valve is also porting its Source engine to the Mac which means third party games that use the Source engine as its basis will be able have their games available for both Windows and Mac. Finally if you own either a Mac or Windows game via Steam you will be able to play its counterpart free of charge. Also, with the Steam Cloud support players can play a game on a Windows machine, save their progress and then play later on a Mac at the same save point.