Before leaving, Andrew had conducted an interview with Interceptor Entertainment over their recent release of Duke Nukem II on the App Store (our review can be found here). What follows are a few short answers to questions about porting the PC classic, and the future projects of the dev team. Enjoy!
Q1: What appealed about Duke Nukem II so much that you just had to bring it to the iOS platform?
A: Duke Nukem II was a great game for its time, and a lot of us grew up with the classic DOS platformers. We felt that the iOS market and mobile market in general had to be re-introduced to these classic dos games that helped shape the game industry as it is today, and Duke nukem II is one of the best ways to start.
Q2: What challenges did you face in bringing the game over from the DOS original to a touch-screen based device?
A: We had a ton of challenges. First of all the source code for the game doesn't exist, which means that we had to hack and emulate an old dos system in order to make it run. The biggest challenges were making it run smoothly and making it compatible with touch screen controls.
Q3: The soundtrack still sounds as amazing as ever! Were you tempted to update it in any way?
A: We sure were! Unfortunately the rights to the music in Duke 2 is owned by Bobby P:rince who is no longer in the industry, and very hard to work with. This meant that we had to have the music stay intact... but we did add a new badass track for the start screen of the game.
Q4: Any other Apogee titles you'd love to bring back to life for today's audiences? How would you approach them?
A: We have a number of Apogee/3DRealms games in the pipeline. The next game is Duke 1 which we are excited to release next month. What comes after? Only time will tell!
And there you have it. Short, but sweet. We can look forward to more ports of PC classic to the iOS in the future, plus the dev team is hard at work on their remake of Rise of the Triad which is set to release this summer. Will that get an iOS port? Only time will tell!
