Valve launches teaser campaign for new Mac version of Steam

Valve Software has all but confirmed rumors that it plans to bring its Steam gaming system to the Mac desktop in a teaser campaign that mimics generations of Apple advertisements.

Valve began seeding a variety of gamer blogs like Joystiq with ad images featuring characters from its video game titles and presented in the style of current and past Mac ad campaigns run by Apple.

Steam's teaser ads paid homage to Apple's 1984 "Introducing Macintosh. For the rest of us." print ad; the "1984" television spot where a woman runs to destroy the Big Brother screen representing IBM; the "Think Different" ad campaign that Steve Jobs ran after returning to the helm of Apple in 1997; the shadow ads on a bright backdrop Apple ran for iPods; and the company's current "Get a Mac" campaign.

Last week, users reported the discovery of resource files that appeared to be created for Mac OS X within the updated version of Steam for Windows PCs.

Valve's latest software update for Steam introduced a new user interface (below) and dropped Microsoft's Trident rendering engine from Internet Explorer in preference for the open source WebKit engine Apple uses in Safari.

John Cook, the Director of Steam Development at Valve said this move "gives us a bunch of size, stability and performance benefits. This release of Steam leaves us well prepared for another year of strong growth."