Mac Gaming News - Army Drops Mac Version of America's Army

by , 3:55 PM EDT, April 27th, 2006

This week, Mac gaming programmer Ryan Gordon confirmed in his blog that the Army has dropped the Mac and Linux versions of its first-person shooter America's Army, which was created in 2003 to help military recruitment. While the Army officially ended development of everything but the Windows version at least a year ago, Mr. Gordon acknowledged that he had been allowed to keep working on the Mac and Linux versions on his own time.

He said, however, that the Army currently only pays him to maintain the Linux server for the game, with the Mac and Linux versions cancelled "several versions ago. Let's say it happened when GameSpy jacked their prices, but the port wasn't actually cancelled because of the GameSpy fiasco; while it definitely didn't help, the two events just happened to coincide."

GameSpy's licensing costs increase forced Mr. Gordon to pull that code out of the Mac version and create a workaround. "Sometimes the project is more important than the paycheck," he said of his pro bono programming work. At this point, however, he doesn't have the time to keep his America's Army work going, given the number of paying jobs he has.

"The Army, I think, probably sees these freebie ports as a nuisance, since they're almost always late, and all they see are complaints from the Mac and Linux users about delays in a project they thought they axed several releases ago," Mr. Gordon wrote. At this point, version 2.6 of America's Army "might still make it out the door; 2.7 probably won't."

However, he made it clear that Apple's release of Boot Camp had nothing to do with his decision, as some people on an America's Army forum thread thought. The Mac Observer is currently waiting to hear back from America's Army representatives regarding the decision to axe the Mac and Linux versions of the game, but responses to questions likely won't happen until next week. At that time, we will post their responses.