Today we shipped CrossOver Games. I am very excited by this change; I have enjoyed computer games all of my life, and I like the idea that we can help others enjoy their new computers fully.
I'm also tickled by the story of how CrossOver Games came to be, and thought I would share it with you all.
We have long focused on productivity applications. Now, last year we did officially add support for games, and we made a few hires so that we could more directly support all of the great work being done in Wine on games. But, truthfully, our core focus has been on productivity applications such as Microsoft Office and Quicken.
So go back to last fall and early this winter. We're hard at work on the back breaking work of fixing Office 2007, Outlook, and recent Adobe products. We're grinding along, making slow progress. And all this time we keep noticing the most amazing progress on games. Stefan, along with the volunteers on the Wine project, is just raging in a cage; a day hardly goes by without another game running, or the framerate of a game rising, or a long standing game defect fixed.
And our Advocates start to notice; our Office support in our nightly builds isn't all that great, but boy is the game support coming along nicely.
And someone asks me: when are you going to ship all of this great work on games?
Well, I've sworn we won't ship CrossOver 7.0 until Office 2007 runs.
And, what's more, we really can't have CrossOver 7 be affected by games; after all, we need plenty of time to test and make sure it is stable and robust. At the pace and speed they are moving, before we finished a first QA run, they'd have a bunch more games fixes ready to ship.
In fact, Stefan and those game guys are going so nuts, they really should be on their own release cycle...
Doh!
So I'm happy to say that CrossOver Games came into existence strictly because of the brilliant work of a bunch of talented developers. You could argue that they forced my hand (forced, yes, it was torture for me to test Civ IV, torture, I tell you! 😊 ).
So, thank you to Roderick Colenbrander, Christian Costa, Alexander Dorofeyev, Stefan Dösinger, Jason Edmeades, Jason Green, Ivan Gyurdiev, Maarten Lankhorst, Vitaliy Margolen, Marcus Meissner, Oliver Stieber, Lionel Ulmer, Henri Verbeet and many others.
I am deeply grateful for all of their hard work, and I hope that we can help many people to enjoy the fruit of their labors, even if that enjoyment comes in the form of blowing each other to smithereens...
Cheers,
Jeremy