Previous to the iPhone and iPod touch, Apple wasn’t exactly synonomous with gaming, the Mac platform as a whole was a joke in the gaming community actually. Now that the iPhone and iPad are being touted as the next-gen mobile consoles to have though, Apple is more concerned with gaming than ever. That’s why losing Graeme Devine, the man responsible for making sure that the iPhone, iPod and iPad were the most friendly they could be to gamers and game developers, is such a loss.

In an interview with Kotaku Devine was hired on “…to make gaming on the iOS devices fantastic. Basically that meant looking at the technologies involved and making sure the software played well with the hardware, to look at upcoming hardware/API and say ‘Yup, that is a good thing’.”

Devine goes on to say that “Apple didn’t have an in-house game designer before me so I think it was pretty unique, game technologies touch everything from the graphics stack to touch latency to push notifications. No other app type covers so many technologies and having someone there to validate and help shape that was basically my day job. It was pretty kick ass.”

He’s moving on to go back to game development for the Mac and iOS platforms, providing only a single image as a clue to his next project for Mac.

Losing him is certainly a hit for Apple’s gaming department but Devine says that Apple isn’t going to rest on it’s gaming laurels.

“Apple has the smartest and most talented group of people I have ever worked with,” he said. “Every day I would walk in and feel I was working alongside geniuses and I the guy with crayons in the corner.

“I can’t comment on what’s next inside Apple, but I can tell you, they really do ‘get’ gaming.”

Kotaku