Apple looking for video game artist for iPhone Gaming Group

learnsomuch-introducing-the-new-ipod-touch

Despite the fact that the iPod Touch is increasingly being branded as a gamer’s device, Apple’s never had much truck with gaming… at least in-house. But new calls for a video game artist for the iPhone Gaming Group imply that Apple might be preparing to make a serious push into the gaming market, perhaps to better compete with other handhelds like the Nintendo DS.

From the call for the artist:

The interactive media group is looking for a skilled artist who wants to work as part of a small highly motivated team to work on interactive multimedia experiences on the iPhone and iPod touch. The position on the team is to help design, visualize, enable and implement interface, 3-D characters/environments, animation, texturing as well as original concept artwork.

Some people are seeing in this job listing the first glimpses of some future game designed by Apple to showcase the potential of their iPhone hardware. I don’t see it: the App Store and third-party developers already showcase that potential excellently.

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Instead, I wonder if what we could be looking at is the first hints of an iPhone and iPod Touch gamer’s front end, similar to what we see on the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live. I seriously doubt Apple’s going to start producing their own games, but an artfully composed front end with modifiable user avatars, achievements, multiplayer gaming, virtual chat and the rest would go a long way to show that Apple was serious about the iPhone as a gaming platform.

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About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Gaming, iPhone, News, Top stories |

porkchop1234
Apple making their own video games LMFAO!!!!! I got it their very first game will be a iconic looking Steve Jobs being followed around by a million slobbering fan boys.
If Apple wants to make inroads in the gaming industry they need to embrace third party gaming companies not unlike what Sony and later MS did when they tried to launch their first generation consoles. Sega made the huge mistake of never opening their first generation console (hint hint to Apple) up to third party development and were destroyed by the release of the PS2. Supposedly Apple was discussing better exposure for credited gaming companies (Gameloft, Electronic Arts, etc) on iTunes only time will tell I guess.
A more snazzy gamer interface such as chat capability, better online playing etc would go a long way to distance the touch ahead of the PSP and DS. Considering the DS is so primitive and lackluster in titles the only real competition they would have in my opinion would be the PSP. I can’t see Apple actually creating their own games. Jobs himself has stated he doesn’t care about gaming and what the CEO deems as unworthy becomes taboo in a mega corp environment.
David Randall
Steve Jobs also hated the word ‘iMac’ at first. He wanted to call it something else. But guess what? Others at Apple convinced him to go with it, and the product became an iconic success. What you fail to understand is that Steve Jobs is not the only one making decisions at Apple. Duh. There are other smart and talented people (e.g. Jonathan Ives) who surround Jobs and weigh in on decisions every day at Apple. Those people tend to be invisible names and we rarely hear about them. But Apple is not just about Steve Jobs. Even if Jobs dislikes something, that doesn’t mean that the concept is doomed at Apple.
>> I got it their very first game will be a iconic looking Steve Jobs
>> being followed around by a million slobbering fan boys.
Based on your comment above, it’s near-sighted people like you that actually make Steve Jobs to be more than he is. People like you that peg Steve Jobs to be the only person that counts at Apple. That’s not true at all. That is about as stupid as saying that Barrack Obama is the only person making decisions and the only person whose decisions matter in the United States of America. Clearly a stupid view.
Jobs is only one guy at Apple. An important guy, but only one guy. He’s not the only one that makes the company run. Apple is a company that is successful because it actually has thousands of talented and hard-working employees and engineers. And their names are not Steve.
porkchop1234
Finally I got someone commenting with some edge. Lets see if this thread actually bears some intelligent conversational fruition.
–First of all my opening comment was simply a joke, a lack luster joke I admit but was not meant to be in any way serious. This is the net my friend and if you can’t have a laugh now and again then why bother even using it.
–Secondly I’m very aware that Jobs isn’t the end all when it comes to business decisions and that there are a lot of talented people in Apple. I’m being neither short sighted nor am I implying that Apple couldn’t be known as a good gaming software company if they ever actually tried to be. The problem is with the exception of developing a platform condusive to mobile gaming with the touch/iphone they haven’t tried in the past aren’t currently trying in the present and have shown no interest in the future.
If they actually tried developing games for the Mac OS X I would be one ecstatic user for the simple reason that their OS stability coupled with their excellent hardware configurations would offer a wonderful gaming experience. The problem is THEIR NOT EVEN THINKING OF IT IN THE NEAR FUTURE. Hell if they would even approach some third party gaming developers and struck a deal to bring more games to the OS X platform I would be happy.
–Finally I know very well that the only reason that Apple survived was because they cut away the fat and rebuilt from the ground up to the very top. To do so it required the attention of many industrious people in the back ground as well as Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs didn’t save Apple it was Jobs along with the people around him that saved Apple. My gripe in my above post is quite clear or at least in my mind it is. If you want some of the more involved games or the latest titles in the gaming world you either have to have a PC or a console. The very vast majority of gamers and I mean the VAST MAJORITY don’t even consider OS X as a viable gaming platform. The few that do use Macs are running games off of windows through boot camp. My question is and has always been why should we have to ?
People think Apple will in the near future start a personalized gaming platform for OS X, well I hope their right. My point is show me the proof. The only interest Apple seems to be showing in gaming is in acquiring more quality titles for the touch/iphone. That’s the basic reality of it end of story.
porkchop1234
Oh and P.S.
You’re more then welcome to disagree about a view but WATCH your mouth when you throw the word STUPID around the last thing you want to do is piss me off. I can easily make the word stupid stick to a lot of your past comments. So BE CAREFUL concerning the words you choose as your rebuttal.