At this point, most people have said what needs to be said about the passing of Steve Jobs. One thing I think can be said, though, was that he wasn’t really into videogames. Despite a couple unsuccessful attempts, the Mac never really became an extraordinary gaming platform, and with the iPhone/iPod, gaming was only a side effect of its other utility, even if it ended up becoming one of its most lucrative & successful elements.

I say that because I don’t want to say that Steve Jobs set out to revolutionize the game industry. That he did exactly that only really speaks to the fact that the underlying philosophy that he instilled Apple with made that so – and that’s quite a spectacular thing.

For many years while working in the traditional console industry, I (and almost everyone I knew) dreamed of independent development – but it was always a dream that was out of our grasp. Things were getting to complex. Too graphically intensive. Games became too expensive and too complex to develop, and it wasn’t getting any easier. Instead of teams of 10, teams were now 300+, and only the top 5-10 games in any year ever made any appreciable amount of money.

The kinds of stories you’d read about as a kid – id Software, Apple Computer – that kind of garage development was gone forever.

And then suddenly, it wasn’t.

The iPhone wasn’t built to be a gaming platform that could be served by a bunch of indies. It wasn’t built, really, to be a gaming platform at all. But the core ideas behind it – omnipresence, ease-of-use, and accessibility – are the things that make it so appealing, and that applies just as much to games as non-games. Previous to the iPhone, you had to deal with what platform your phone ran, how to get the game (whether you’d download it from the developers or the carriers, or if you could even get anything at all), and then you’d have to deal with wildly varying hardware specs which meant that all mobile games were developed for the lowest common denominator… the iPhone gave developers the first and best single platform to develop mobile games on.

Even today, if you compare the difference between Android & Apple, the things that make iOS succeed are the bits that are deeply ingrained with Apple’s core DNA. The biggest being that there are fewer variations on the hardware because people don’t care about specs, they care about what the device does. And that simpler interactions are often ultimately more powerful than complex ones.

But more than that, it created a whole segment of games that you could create with your friends in a garage. Graphics had to be good, but good no longer meant normal-mapped high-poly 3D with dynamic lighting. Good meant that it had to feel good, not that it had to be expensive. The tools that were available – persistent online, GPS, tilt, etc. were fantastically varied, and enabled a whole new type of game – types of games that we haven’t even seen fully realized yet.

Self Aware Games exists because Apple created this thing, almost from nothing. They took the chaotic, fragmented, carrier-dominated world of mobile phones & completely redefined it. They gave us the platform, and it’s let us realize our dreams. I work with friends. We make things we want to make how we want to make them. We don’t need a team of a hundred people to make something awesome. We need a handful of brilliant folks who passionately love what they’re doing, and we can have an impact.

So while creating a new generation of independent developers was most likely not Apple’s goal when it created the iPhone, the philosophy behind the creation of the device made this possible. And while there are many, many others to thank, if I’m going to thank folks for allowing me to have the best job I could ever dream of, I feel a tremendous personal debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs. He changed the way people think about technology. The future will be built, in large part, on his shoulders.