I’m curious, when the iPhone SDK was first released, how did game developers get such good 3D games onto the iPhone? I can’t imagine that there were game engines optimised for the platform at that point? And surely they didn’t just do it without an engine all together? So would they have had to optimise one themselves?
I’m referring to games like Cro-Mag Rally and Kroll that were released along-side the App Store in 2008.
Many thanks,
Adam
While I’m not certain about the specific cases, there are many game engines out there, and there are those who make their own, specific to the project (these are usually not new comers to game development 
). My guess is they started with an engine where they had the source and ported to iPhone.
Pangea, makers of Cro-Mag Rally, have been in the games business (on Mac and PC before iDevices) for 22 years, so I’m guessing they have at least one in-house 3D engine. And, like many of the first games on iPhone, Cro-Mag Rally predates the iPhone by quite a number of years (the mac it targets almost has a lower spec than the phone ).
Cheers,
Galen
Ah I see. Porting from an engine that they’re already using makes sense. Sounds like quite a difficult job though, but I’m not sure.
And I imagine that moving from the Mac to the iPhone made the job a lot simpler too, being based around the same OS.
Thanks very much
Adam
Well… why not? Some people like to work at low level, all C / OpenGL ES and so on. Others also like to work on engines by itself (e.g. most of folks at Unity ;)).