In our defence, we did stress that a rumored visit by Tim Cook to Valve’s offices in Bellevue, WA, wasn’t anything to start making assumptions about, but Gabe Newell, Head Guy at Valve, says the visit never even happened. In a podcast interview, Newell flatly denied Cook visited the office and effectively k-lined crazy blogosphere onanism over a major Apple-Valve project that’s currently in the works. Though we tried a simmer down na approach to the story, we were wrong about Cook even visiting.
Here’s a bit of Newell’s talk on the subject during a podcast with Kotaku:
We actually, we all sent mail to each other, going, “Who’s Tim Cook meeting with? Is he meeting with you? I’m not meeting with Tim Cook.” So we’re… it’s one of those rumors that was stated so factually that we were actually confused.
No one here was meeting with Tim Cook or with anybody at Apple that day. I wish we were! We have a long list of things we’d love to see Apple do to support games and gaming better. But no, we didn’t meet with Tim Cook. He seems like a smart guy, but I’ve never actually met him.
This rumor looked like a green light to a lot of Internet blogs just itching to hit the gas pedal, and few drove in the wrong direction further than Cult of Mac (though, to be fair, that’s kinda their thing). Not only did they run a headline saying “Why Apple CEO Tim Cook Met With Valve [Exclusive]” (which they have since edited to say “updated” instead of “exclusive”), but they said “Our sources also say that Apple’s television set will come with an Apple-branded, Kinect-like video game console. The interface will rely heavily on motion and touch controls” and “the two companies are obviously talking to one another”.
Awkward.
Valve did come out strong with Mac support in 2010 with the release of Steam (along with several top-notch Valve games), and Apple does have a pretty good thing going with the gaming successes of iOS, but if there’s more to the story, there’s absolutely nothing out there at the moment dropping any discernible clues.
Source: Macrumors
