While enterprise features such as Exchange support and VPN might make your company IT department tremble with excitement, the rest of us are slyly eyeing up the possibility of arcade-style gaming on the iPhone.  Back at the roadmap event, Apple announced it had been working with SEGA to bring Super Monkey Ball to the handset, using the iPhone’s accelerometers to guide the simian around the track.  GameCyte caught up with Ethan Einhorn, an associate producer at SEGA, to discuss the upcoming title as well as the future of so-called “casual gaming”.

Check out the video interview after the cut

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQPCiO0O62A[/youtube]

Casual gaming is the description of titles with no steep learning curve or fifty-page instruction guide detailing which buttons do what.  Instead, they’re intended to be “pick-up-and-play”, making them ideal for casual iPhone use.  Of course, as Einhorn also points out, the relatively closed and controlled developing environment of the iPhone (and its PMP cousin) makes for straightforward coding: no software compatibility to worry about, since they’re uniform devices.

And what of the future?  Can we expect to see Sonic, or any of the other SEGA characters blessing the iPhone and iPod Touch?  Einhorn is cautious but enthused:

“Sega and Apple have a terrific relationship; we’ve had a lot of fun working on the Super Monkey Ball demo, and it would make sense to take the next natural step – but we haven’t announced anything at this time – We also are really excited to see what other Sega properties would make sense on that platform. So, there’s a lot of discussion, and I think fans are going to be very happy”Ethan Einhorn, Associate Producer, SEGA