Apple revises trademark to include gaming devices

by Scott Jon Siegel on Feb 11th 2008 10:45AM

Apple recently filed to extend its trademark to include gaming-related devices, Trademork reports. This is the most recent story in a long line of rumors and speculation, all suggesting that Apple may be entering the games market sometime in the near future.

The revised trademark will associate "Apple" with a number of gaming-related categories, including "hand-held units for playing video games", and "stand alone video game machines". Of interest here is the specificity of these categories; the iPod may be a device which allows game playing, but it is arguably not a device "for" playing games, leading us to believe the trademark extension may reference an entirely new product dedicated to gaming.

On a possibly related note, Apple posted a job listing in September of last year for a "Game Producer/Designer." The position may be related to game development on the iPod series, however, and not to any new product.

[Via Engadget]

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Reader Comments (153)

Lol, I'll probably get voted all the way down for this, but I just can't help it. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant

A few months ago, I'd probably faint at this news, but seriously, it's the logical next step now that they've gotten so many devices communicating music, movies, and tv shows with each other. It really seemed like the only direction they could take the company after that is games.

I could really imagine them being one of the first companies to make gaming finally communicate among multiple devices in a truly seemless manner. Perhaps a game console where you download all your games and they can play on either your Appletv style device or your mac computer and in some cases your iphone, ipod, or some sort of portable device.

That said, I also see them really going the casual route here, it seems to be a bit more their market for one. For two, the new Imacs as well as macbook airs have poor video cards for gaming. It's very difficult to even port 360 games to any mac because they don't really do the kind of processing the 360 does. According to aspyr Guitar hero III even had some difficulties.

All that aside, I think I'd like to see them compete with what Sony is doing and make a really seamless multimedia product for gaming and everything else, all available on itunes!

Somehow, I just can't see Apple going head to head with the 360 at all. It does not have an image that lends itself to violent shooters.

I can somewhat see it aiming for the PS3 and trying to do more puzzle/platformer/rpg/adventure type games and a variety of newer types of things, but I just can't see an apple version of GTA IV. They can't really market it as "Apple. Kill different in GTA IV". It doesn't work.

I can see them trying to go head to head with Nintendo though and try to steal up that market, since Nintendo/apple kinda try to market to the same demographic.

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