Valve teases Apple announcement of ... something [update]

We'd love to outright confirm that "OMG, yes, Steam is finally coming to Mac!" but that'd be a lie. Truth is, of the five images that Valve sent out to a handful of outlets (as seen in our gallery below) – each one depicting characters from separate Valve games in some form of faux Mac advertisement (from Half-Life to Left 4 Dead and everything in between) – none provide ironclad confirmation of our suspicion that the developer is likely porting Steam over to OS X.

That said, given the presence of six dots at the bottom of each of the five images we've seen so far, suggesting an iTunes-like image gallery with six images, we're hoping for an actual news release in the not-too-distant future ... ~~possibly via that sixth image~~. For now, we've put in a call to Valve and will be speculating wildly in the meantime. Check out the five screens so far in the gallery below and get to the speculating with us, won't you?

Update: Valve kindly sent over the last image, which unfortunately doesn't "OMG confirmed!" our guesses. It is, however, the coolest (fake) ad yet.

Valve Mac faux ads

[Thanks, Joe K]

Reader Comments (137)

this is probably gonna blow your mind, but companies can do more than one thing at once

The weirdest thing is you're (presumably) named after Marathon: Durandal, one of the biggest classic Mac games, and you're mad about Valve wasting time with Mac gaming.

I'm not trying to knock you, it just seems a little funny.

Durandal is actually a mythological medieval sword... and Bungie has a history of naming their AIs after said swords (see also: Cortana), and Durandal was the Marathon AI. So he could just be a sword fan.

No, that's too much of a stretch.

Marathon: Durandal was also re-released on XBLA, so he might only be familiar with that version.

Not so much of a stretch.

@rTwelve

Sword fan? Really? God, now I am worried he really is some unhinged nut job with a bunch of flea market katanas! :P

This is awesome news, but my only real concern is what happens if we already bought games off of Steam for Windows? I'm hoping that if I own the Steam Windows version of Team Fortress 2, for example, I can download the Mac version as well.

Unlikely, but I can hope. Regardless, my love (and my wallet's hate) for Steam grows.

I would assume you could. Its still the same account, maybe steam will detect if you are in OSX or Windows and then download the suited version. Of course only the games avalible for that certain platform would should up in the store.
Also I felt abliged to reply to you since you have the same name as me:O

Well if you already bought games off of Steam, then presumably you have a computer you can play them on, but of course there are a few exceptions.

Well, basically I'm hoping it's like The Sims 3, or WoW, where it would install the correct version depending on what OS you were using no matter where you bought it from, and not like the godawful Asypr ports that came out a year or two later, were sold at full price and were chock full of bugs, and required a separate purchase.

@cloud
You're absolutely right, I can play Team Fortress 2 with Bootcamp. But lately I've been having a lot of issues with Bootcamp randomly bluescreening and deleting random files. It's particularly fond of saved games...

I kind of think this is more of an 'iTunes store will be selling computer games' ad then just introducing Steam coming to Mac. It may just be Apple licensing Steam characters to hype that fact. I may be wrong but that's what I get from reading the 1st page. I mean, I'm sure it may be deeper in the sense that the developers who will participate in an iTunes VG store will port their games for Mac as well. Steam in the forefront. But I still think a 6 page ad just for Steam coming to Mac is a bit too exorbitant.

Oops, nevermind... I got confused.

I need Freeman as a wallpaper. :D

I HAVE Freeman as a wallpaper. These ads are awesome.

NO MORE BOOTCAMP! YAY! :)

Brilliant stuff.

@ KEK
Haters gonna hate

Sweet! Now Mac owners can finally play HL2 and other games that are 5 years old!!!

OMG The hundreds of Mac users will love this!

I'm proud to be part of that group!

Why are you guys waging a 2 decade old fanboy war started by silly companies? I am glad to finally get steam. I would think we should be happy the game developers we all like will be getting more business, especially in these crappy times.

Half-Life 1984 parody is much win.

It's not only iPods/iPhones that apple is selling. Year by year apples stake in the Computer world is growing by 3%, 5% in the US alone for the past 3 to 4 years now.
Macs are the most used laptops at Schools. Apple Is the biggest electronic company in the world.

Put all this stuff together and you have more of a idea Y Valve is doing this.
And if you look at the numbers of the year by year growth Apples market shares grow more and more every year by a bigger market take of that year compared to the last year.

Things are changing. And if you see your Computer as only a "window to play games on" and you might be missing out on what a computer is made to do.

For those that may not know, the last image is a parody of this ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
Which is in turn a parody of 1984

Steam coming to mac announcement aside, that article was pretty damn funny.

"then somebody had an idea: they should get into a fight."

yay

This is great news. And the images are awesome, however I'd have loved to see the G-Man from Half-Life in a black turtleneck and jeans standing in front of a giant keynote screen with the steam logo on it.

This is brilliant if Steam is coming to Macs...I have always wanted to buy a Mac..but held off because the lack of game support, but if Steam comes aboard...I am going to be set.

these ads are simply breathtaking. i just watched the movie "art & copy" which talked about ad campaigns and featured apple quite prominently and all of the ads that steam have chosen to mimic were talked about which really just makes this post for me. + woo! steam for me!

How can you be certain that it isnt steam? It says Steam in the Classic Mac ad.

Wow, that's pretty awesome. I've been having trouble getting Windows to work on my Mac for a while now, but this would be great. The only thing I wonder, though, is if I'll be able to transfer my account/games from my existing Steam account onto a Mac account? I really, really hope so, because I've got about $100 worth of games on there.

If this happens, I will be so very happy. It could lead to eliminating most of my use of my Windows 7 partition.

I am going to have to get a good mouse for my iMac then. WooT!

Somewhere "out there" is an internet petitioner who feels validated. This could be bad.

'sfunny, I just woke up dreaming about a Valve announcement :P
Though in my dream, it was a HL2 Ep3 teaser.

How can Steam be on OSX if Mac has no gaems?

Should I really answer this? Or is this question such an dumb question, and should ignore him??

....................................

Nope, ill ignore him.

Anyone notice that the gun turrent, was facing that [what ever its called] in that Portal/apple parody ad?

Now they need to Develop for Linux. Once that happens, THEN I can Celebrate.

Previous 50 Comments

Valve teases Apple announcement of ... something [update]

Valve Mac faux ads

Reader Comments (137)

Posted: Mar 3rd 2010 4:42PM TheDarkWayne said

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Posted: Mar 3rd 2010 4:42PM Colin said

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