Steve Jobs's top 10 contributions to video gaming

Steve Jobs may have resigned as CEO of Apple, but his influence is stronger than ever.

The world’s most enduring advocate of nondescript black turtlenecks has made his mark in many a field of expertise - including our humble little gaming industry.

While he isn’t solely responsible for any of the contributions that follow, there’s no doubt that Apple’s long-time leader played a pivotal role in all of them.

It’s hard to believe now, but once upon a time Steve Jobs was just another Atari employee.

The gaming company was preparing to launch a new arcade game called Breakout, and assigned Jobs the task of efficiently redesigning the system board.

Each time Jobs managed to removed a chip - thus making the design cheaper for Atari to manufacture - he’d net himself a $100 bonus.

But Jobs didn’t play it straight - he contacted his skilled friend Steve Wozniak, who totally streamlined the design for Jobs, netting a $5000 payment. Jobs then lied about the size of the bonus and paid his friend only $375 for his four-day marathon.

In the end, Atari had to redesign the board anyway, because it couldn’t understand how Wozniak had made it work.

Finding, downloading, and installing Mac software used to be a bit of a tricky business.

If you knew the industry well you wouldn’t have much trouble finding where to look, but for newcomers the fragmented and disjointed Mac software market was a pain to navigate.

The Mac App Store has put a pretty swift end to that. It’s not as famous as its older mobile brother, but the Mac App Store is a harbinger of things to come for the desktop software ecosystem.

It’s quickly building up an impressive library of gaming titles, too - Jedi Knight II and Grand Theft Auto III are two of the latest classics to be ported across, and many more are likely to follow.

It’s not an overstatement to say that Apple has revolutionised mobile gaming - for reasons we’ll get on to later - but Game Center hasn’t been actually been a part of that revolution for very long. Indeed, it’s less than a year old.

It’s clearly not an original idea, either, taking obvious cues from other gaming networks like Steam and Xbox Live.

But a few short years ago the idea of running an ecosystem comparable to Steam or Xbox Live on a mobile phone would have seemed ridiculous - and now look where we are. It’s not all there yet, but mobile gaming is finally starting to lose its status as the little brother of ‘proper’ gaming.

Where would we be today without the graphical user interface and the mouse? Steve Jobs didn’t invent either, but thanks to the Macintosh he helped popularise them.

Of course, gaming existed before the GUI - you know you’re old if you can remember typing in MS-DOS launch commands - but the mouse was a particular godsend for first-person shooters and real-time strategy gamers.

Ironically, Steve Jobs’s post-PC obsession may see the mouse he helped popularise rendered obsolete.

What is hybrid gaming, you ask? Well, just imagine coming home from work, putting your feet up, and playing a brand new AAA release on your home console system.

Okay, most of you probably don’t need to imagine that. So now imagine that the home console is an iPhone, and you’re streaming the visuals to your TV via AirPlay.

Epic Games’s Mike Capps says it best: “Your iPhone 8 will probably plug into your TV, or better yet, wirelessly connect to your television set to give you that big screen gaming experience with good sound.

“So really, what’s the point of those next-gen consoles?”

The long-running Prince of Persia series can trace its origins back to the long-gone days of the Apple II.

It was a breakthrough, featuring a level of animation detail that was simply unprecedented. It might not look so hot now, but that Apple II hardware powered the start of an entire franchise.

Alright, we’re stretching the premise of this article a bit by crediting Steve Jobs for this, but look at it this way - if it weren’t for the Apple II we may never have got the Prince of Persia movie.

Magical? Revolutionary? Whether or not you buy the hyperbole, there’s no doubting that creating an entirely new category of device is a fair accomplishment - especially when iPad is probably best defined by what it lacks.

Steve Jobs is a notorious minimalist, and it definitely shows in the iPad. There are no windows to manage. No HDMI or USB ports. No Flash. Originally, there was no camera or multitasking. And there’s still no proper file system.

No wonder people called it a giant iPod touch.

But as far as gaming goes, trimming away the fat made it a lean machine. The iPad managed to be so much more than the sum of its parts - and the iPad 2 pushes things even further with a lightning fast graphics chip.

Halo is one of the most successful franchises in gaming history, and Steve Jobs may be responsible for getting it noticed. In 1999, during his Macworld keynote presentation, the Apple frontman handed over the stage to Bungie’s own leader, Jason Jones.

It was the first time that the public had ever seen Halo - and it may well have changed the course of gaming history.

Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on

Jobs had hoped the shooter would spearhead a gaming revolution on the Mac, but Microsoft had other ideas - buying the indie team and setting it to work on re-engineering Halo for Microsoft’s upcoming “DirectX Box” console.

Would Microsoft still have acquired Bungie were it not for Steve Jobs prioritising Halo? Maybe - but maybe not.

The iPhone is probably Steve Jobs’s most famous product - he wasn’t exaggerating by much when he announced that Apple was going to “reinvent the phone”.

Apple only launched the device in 2007, but already it’s hard to remember a time before multitouch displays and home buttons.

It’s only gotten better since then, adding cameras, the App Store, multitasking, a Retina display, and a whole host of other additions that make mobile gaming a blissful experience - especially when compared to what came before.

And the best is yet to come, if you believe in hybrid gaming.

Apple’s iPods, iPhones, and iPads have all changed the world of consumer electronics, but gaming is ultimately a question of software - and Steve Jobs’s obsession with ease-of-use and simplicity has made its mark here, too.

It's called the App Store, and if you’re reading this website then you’ll almost certainly know it intimately.

With tens of thousands of titles at all manner of price ranges, the App Store changed the games industry forever.

Why is Microsoft integrating the Marketplace directly into Windows 8? Why has the Nintendo 3DS sold so poorly? Why was the HP TouchPad discontinued?

These are tricky questions, with no single explanation - but there’s no doubt that the App Store has played a big role in all of them.