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Sami PetrosSteve Jobs was pissed when Microsoft bought Bungie
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Before creating the Halo series, Bungie was already a well-known developer of shooting games for Mac. So when Microsoft acquired the studio to make games for the Xbox, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wasn't happy at all. No, he was pissed.
So pissed, in fact, that he actually called Microsoft. "As soon as we announced we bought Bungie, Steve Jobs called," shared Microsoft VP of game publishing Ed Fries with Develop. "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."
It must've been some phone call, seeing as Ballmer asked someone else to deal with the situation. "...I got an email from Steve Ballmer asking me to phone Steve Jobs and calm him down about the whole thing," Fries said. "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."
For one reason or another, Steve Jobs didn't buy Bungie himself and allowed the studio to remain third-party. Perhaps it was because Apple's interest in gaming at the time wasn't as keen as now, so acquiring a video game studio at the time may not have been in their priorities.
At any rate, Bungie has now moved on from Microsoft, signing a ten-year deal with Activision last April.
Source: Qj.net
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