With MacSoft’s pending release of Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT 2K3) only a couple of weeks away, some long-time fans of the first-person shooter franchise have wondered what will happen with Unreal Tournament itself. It appears that the developer behind UT 2K3 may revisit that older code and bring a new OS X version forth.
Unreal Tournament, released long before Mac OS X saw the light of day, never made a very successful transition to Mac OS X. Westlake Interactive, the developer behind UT’s conversion, produced several Mac OS X-compatible “preview” releases as a labor of love. Those versions worked for some players, but stopped short of being “official” point releases and were occasionally fraught with problems.
Westlake president Glenda Adams coordinated those efforts, but Adams is taking a new role at game publisher Aspyr Media, which left some gamers to wonder about the future of Unreal Tournament on Mac OS X. Adams thought it unlikely that she’d be able to do any more coding on the game.
Last night on Sean Smith’s The Gamesome Mac QuickTime Webcast, Smith interviewed Epic Games’ Ryan Gordon — the developer who managed the Mac conversion of Unreal Tournament 2003, and who’s working on the Linux version as well. Unlike its predecessor, Unreal Tournament 2003 is built for the ground up to support Mac OS X.
Gordon told Smith that he plans to merge Westlake’s code with his own efforts to get a true Mac OS X version of Unreal Tournament done. “… get it done, finished, and correct, not half-done experimental stuff,” said Gordon.
To listen for yourself, queue up the archive of the May 26th show to the one hour and 47 minute mark.