Mark Adams is the president of Westlake Interactive, famed for porting many very popular PC titles over to the Macintosh and recently announced as being in charge of porting Deus Ex. Mark's personal bio refers to stints at Origin, Electronic Arts, and Looking Glass Technologies among others, and Westlake's project list includes such hits as Unreal, several Tomb Raiders, and Duke Nukem.
With E3 around the corner and Deus Ex allegedly being very close to completion, we decided to hit Mark up for a little more information about the Macintosh version.
[Deus Ex Incarnate] The team at ION basically has the game complete now, with just voice recording and gameflow tweaks left. Are you guys getting current builds often in order to stay on the same schedule? Or is it inevitable that ports lag the original game?
[Mark Adams] We're getting builds every couple weeks to stay on schedule. It is inevitable that we'll have to ship a couple weeks after they go GM, since of course we can't get the final code & data to roll into the Mac version until they are completely done. But since we've been keeping pace, my guess is Mac DX will be going into duplication around the time the PC
version first hits store shelves (if all goes smoothly).
[Deus Ex Incarnate] Are you guys going to have a booth at E3? If so, has this impacted your schedule at all as far as Deus Ex Mac?
[Mark Adams] We're pretty low key about E3, since we're not attached to a publisher directly (we work with several Mac publishers, including Aspyr Media, the Mac publisher of DX). This year we're so busy getting games out we won't be at E3 ourselves, but I believe there have been some talks about possibly having DX Mac running on a Mac at the Eidos booth.
[Deus Ex Incarnate] Will the port be an exact copy of the PC version, or does content sometimes have to be altered?
[Mark Adams] We really won't change the content much, since a lot of good design and work has gone into the gameplay by Ion Storm. The changes we will make specific to the Mac version are in the more technical layers- we'll add support for RAVE (an Apple 3D API sort of equivalent to Glide) to get the best performance on built-in AT Rage (Pro and 128) cards. We'll also do
some tweaking to make sure it runs on our low end target Macs, and supports a few lower resolutions than the PC (since we have a lot of Rage Pro equipped iMacs that we want to support, we'll offer a 512x384 mode for in-game play, switching to 640x480 for inventory and interface screens).
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