Valve is coming to Mac

This is tremendously good news if you happen to have a Mac:

Steam is coming to Mac. Not just Steam, though. Judging by these awesome teasers released by Valve, so are Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2 AND Left 4 Dead. Ho-lee crap.

Gordon Freeman with an Apple logo stamped into his chest and the Heavy coming straight out of an iPod commercial here are actually saying quite a lot. Yes, they’re pointing at releases of Half-Life and Team Fortress 2 for Mac, probably announced at the Game Developers Conference later this month. (Well, hopefully.) If they really are teasing Mac releases of those franchises, that’s saying something huge about Valve, and their decision to adopt Mac as a full-fledged platform. I mean, Valve hasn’t even touched the PS3, and now they’re developing for Mac?

Steam for Mac would be one thing: It’s the best digital delivery for PC games around (well, except when my pre-load for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 never showed up), and gaining a foothold on the Mac for distribution would make a certain level of sense, even if Valve wasn’t developing Mac games themselves. (Though it’s also inherently fascinating that the two truest PC gaming companies, in a sense, Valve and Blizzard, may now be developing for the Mac. )

If I could play TF2 on my MacBook Pro without having to boot into Windows, keep all of my Steam settings and games intact and synced across platforms (without repurchasing!), I just might need to change my pants. PC gaming isn’t dying, apparently, it’s moving to Macs.

Migrating to a Mac last year was overall a fine experience – except that I’d put together a decent collection of games on my PC – mainly via Steam – and there are times, I admit, when I’d love to hop on to a Team Fortress 2 map and just fire away for a while.  Or step into the weird dystopian world of City 17 and explore the end of the end of the world for a while.  I don’t miss many games from my PC gaming days, but there’s something so unique and fascinating about Half-Life 2.  It’s not even that addicting a game compared to some – but it has an enduring quality to it, which allows you to set it down and then pick it back up again without missing a beat.