Apple hires Halo Wars lead designer

Apple is quietly ramping up its internal development on iPhone gaming. At least, that's the logical assumption from news that Graeme Devine is now working for the company's iPhone group.

Who he? Devine was most recently lead designer at Ensemble Studios, which developed Halo Wars for Microsoft.

He was also one of the co-founders of Trilobite back in the early 1990s, resulting in games like The 7th Guest and 11th Hour. A proper game development luminary, in other words.

And now he's working on iPhone stuff. For Apple.

So far, the company has only self-published one iPhone game, Texas Hold'em, while publicly maintaining that it has no plans to increase its first-party roadmap.

If that's changed and Devine's hiring may tie in with other recent poachings, like the senior director of strategy for Xbox  then we may find out tonight: Devine has been tweeting that he's working on stuff for WWDC.