Group votes Apple biggest influence on game industry

You're having a run of bad luck there, aren't you, Mario?

First, your company might be posting its first annual loss in more than 30 years, and now a group of video game professionals claim that neither you nor Zelda (or the PlayStation and Internet either) made the biggest impact on video games. Who took your place in the castle?

Steve Jobs and the iPhone.

A survey of 1,000 people working within the gaming industry stated that Jobs is the top person to shape video games, with the iPhone the top product. This was carried out by the London Games Conference, which will be held November 10.

"In just over three years the iPhone and the App Store have transformed what consumers expect of games, and how the industry makes and sells them ... today, download games have come to the fore," said Michael French, editor in chief, MCV, the leading trade magazine of the video games industry.

As with all surveys, this is subjective. A survey this summer said iOS wasn't taking much of a gaming audience away from traditional consoles, for example.

It's hard to deny the impact Apple has had on the current gaming industry. But whether it's the biggest influence in all the years of video gaming? Personally, I'd go with the mustachioed plumber, Atari (where Jobs and Woz worked in the '70s), or the original PlayStation before giving props to Apple.