The Play's The Thing

The 1st iPhone game. No foolin'! (more)

We don't normally make a big deal about April 1st. We don't use it as an excuse to make lame humor, but neither do we avoid making "serious" announcements. We did happen to notice, however, that our last announcement on April 1st was back in 2004 when we started the Mac Aggregate Tracker to follow software releases. That marked a big enough shift from our past efforts that we decided to distinguish it with its own subdomain (mat. instead of buried under www.), and we're doing it again today with

game.subsume.com

We've had ideas for a game on the back burner for a while already, but it was Apple's announcement of the iPhone that really got us moving. It is interesting to note that no gaming has been shown by Apple on the iPhone. Not iPod games, not Widget games, not Safari games. Even if we let the lack of iPod games slide by considering the iPhone a different platform, it is rather striking that Apple never does demo a site on the iPhone with Flash content.

Maybe that's just something that was/is still being worked on and will be ready by the time the iPhone ships, but since we have no insider information (thus allowing us to make the claim of having the 1st iPhone game in development :-) we're going forward using technology that does seem present on the iPhone. Given the presence of Google Maps and Widgets, it is a safe bet that the iPhone would support AJAX for gaming. Even if Apple doesn't intend to allow custom third-party software, browser-based gaming should still be a real possibility for the iPhone.

We're going to stay light on the details until the iPhone gets closer to shipping in June, but keep an eye on the game site and/or pre-register for when we open up beta testing. What we can say is we intend to support the connectivity the iPhone provides by creating an entirely new kind of casual MMOG with support for 100+ million players. So if you're intent on having fun on the iPhone, we hope you'll join us!