When Microsoft acquired Bungie Jobs Was Angered On Ballmer

After almost ten years it appears that after Microsoft's acquisition of Halo's creator Bungie Steve Jobs called Steve Ballmer to express his anger on this deal. Here is what said former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft Ed Fries in his recent interview to Develop:

"...[Jobs] was mad at Ballmer and phoned him up and was angry because we'd just bought the premier Mac game developer and made them an Xbox developer."

Ed also told that later Ballmer asked him to contact Apple's CEO and "calm him down".

At first Bungie had been developing "Halo" for Mac, but in 2000 Microsoft bought this developer and the game was released for Xbox gaming console, which appeared in 2001. The premiere of a title "Halo: Combat Evolved" was celebrated as a serious achievement.

Earlier Bungie had been releasing nice games for Mac ("Marathon", "Oni" and "Myth"), and that could be the cause why Jobs was so mad at Ballmer. After the call Microsoft tried to satisfy Jobs with a new deal that promised to bring some other Bungie's game titles to the Mac. After few years even "Halo: Combat Evolved" was ported to Mac.

"We did this deal with Apple where we'd port some PC games to the Macintosh and help [former Bungie vice president] 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."

Now Bungie may develop new games for Mac as it broke its partnership with Microsoft few years ago. In 2007 its franchising director Brian Jarrard also said that the company may be oriented only on Mac platform in future:

"Now that we're branching off and controlling our destiny, that puts us in a position where we could put ourselves back on the [Mac] platform definitively again".