Some of you may have already heard that Garage Games has made their great announcement regarding Tribes, that they’ve obtained the IP for the game, that they are going to implement it into the InstantAction format (like Legions) available in a browser-format, and that the game will be available as a stand-alone as well. Nothing will be changed content-wise, but a lot of the format for things such as images have been changed so that things are now open source or at least not proprietary.
But…no Mac support.
Cause, see, Tribes 1 came out back when Mac was OS 7, and Windows was 95/98. And whereas as much as Microsoft would like to babble about how it’s made such vast changes and improvements to Windows, it just hasn’t made the kind of changes that the Apple OS has going from OS 7-9 to OS X. Which means that to actually release Tribes 1 for the Mac or port it into InstantAction would mean an almost complete rewrite from the bottom up.
And GarageGames just ain’t willing to do that.
So, I’m going to propose something. GarageGames has the source code for Tribes 1. What if some energetic and inspiring group of Mac developers were to pull together and decide that they would actually rewrite Tribes 1 for the Mac, and in exchange, GarageGames would pop it up on InstantAction? This would not just be cool. It would be an example of the power of the Indie game industry at work.
Otherwise, maybe, just maybe, we’d see Tribes 2 for the Mac. I mean, didn’t someone out there almost complete a Mac build and then drop it?
