AppleTV Should Be Getting Its Casual Games On Soon With A Strikingly Wii-like Remote

A little over a year and a half ago I suggested in Next-Gen that Jobs and company had a potential Trojan Apple up their sleeves with the iTV (now AppleTV). The idea was that the set-top device for streaming digital downloads to your home theater could just as easily become a platform for games. While Sony and Microsoft plotted digital convergence supremacy by using game consoles to capture that infinitely valuable territory above (or more properly now beside) your TV set, Apple seemed in a position to take the opposite route. Knowing he couldn't compete heads up with the console manufacturers, Jobs stayed closer to his iPod-driven home. As I wrote then:

Instead of using games to gain convergence, Jobs and company may just use music and video to wrap up games into a neat set-top bundle.

Although Macworld's Peter Cohen immediately brushed the off the idea in a piece titled Why iTV Won't Be For Gaming, former Xbox Live Arcade chief Greg Canessa let slip a few months later that Apple indeed had gaming plans for the device. Having recently become vice president for console gaming at PopCap Games, Canessa told Wired that

[Casual games] are going to continue to grow into non-core demographics. This is relevant as it pertains to devices that are not currently earmarked as gaming devices: mobile, set-top boxes, Apple TV, MP3 players and other devices in the home that will reach the non-gamer -- people who don’t think they want to play.

Getting people who don't think they want to play the chance to play anyway by putting games on devices they are more comfortable with is precisely the Trojan stratgey to which I'd been referring. A month later, files were discovered in iTunes 7.1 that made reference to gaming on the AppleTV--"Some of the games in your iTunes library were not copied to the Apple TV [...] because they cannot be played on this Apple TV." (GC: Vindicated!)

So where are these Trojan games? Apparently, waiting for just the right interface. According to AppleInsider, the interaction wizards at Cupertino filed a patent in November 2006 (the month I first pressed my absurd claim) for a 3D gaming device that, like the Wiimote, could be used for gesture control of videogames, as well as mimic some of the iPhone's multi-touch abilities:

[The] remote control system also can include optional console . Console can have controller that can perform some or all of the processing described for controller. Console also can have one or more connectors to which accessories can be coupled. Accessories can include cables and/or, game cartridges, portable memory devices (e.g., memory cards, external hard drives, etc.), adapters for interfacing with another electronic device (e.g., computers, camcorders, cameras, media players, etc.), or combinations thereof.

The patent adds that "the absolute x- and y-positions of [the] remote control can be used, for example, in video games to position a user's character or to otherwise track the movement of the remote control in a user's environment" and "zoom into and out of an image or a portion thereof based on the absolute position of the remote control in the third axis."

There's no little irony in the Wiimote-ness of Apple's filing. Nintendo took more than just a page from Apple's marketing book with the industrial design, packaging and marketing campaigns for the Wii. Now Apple is cribbing from Nintendo's grimoire of fun. Let's just hope this Apple isn't as sour as the Pippin.

[via AppleInsider]