Civilization
I'm a big fan of the Civilization games. I recall playing it for the first time back on a crusty old PC machine under DOS. I had a Mac at the time, so the release of Civ for the Mac was a pretty big deal. What impressed me more was that, although the DOS version ran at a blocky 320x240 resolution, the Mac version ran at 640x480 and looked significantly better. It was one of my first memories of a Mac game being dramatically better than the original.
Since I started working on Mac games professionally, I've had a closer relationship than most with the Civ games. The very first game I worked on for Westlake back in 1999 was Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which was in pretty much every way a "sequel" to Civ by the same team that did Civ2. Not long after that, I worked on the Mac version of Civ3 for MacSoft, and we managed to ship that one just 2 months after the PC version - practically unheard of for a third-party porting house. We even squeaked out the editor, although not without some controversy. ;-)
Last week, Aspyr announced that we were going to develop and publish the Mac versions of "Civ3 Complete" and Civ4. The "Civ3 Complete" package is essentially the original game along with the 2 expansion packs. The most notable new feature in Civ3 Complete is multiplayer, although it'll be Mac only since it used DirectPlay originally.
Fate has once again conspired to put me on these projects, although admittedly it was almost a necessity for Civ3. The Aspyr version of Civ3 is, for all intents, a "re-porting" of the original PC code. The rights for the Mac version had expired from MacSoft, so Aspyr was able to pick them up as I understand it. However, it also means that we didn't have any of the Mac code for the MacSoft version. Interestingly, I had sent a bunch of fixes and changes back to the Firaxis guys for the core Civ3 game while doing the MacSoft port, so that has helped a little, along with my familiarity with the game code. On a personal level, I'm quite pleased that I'll finally be able to go back and "finish" Civ3 for the Mac.
Unfortunately, it looks like the editor will not make it this time around. It was a real time sink (and quite a moving target) to do the first time for MacSoft, and without the old Mac code to go on, it'd be pretty involved. We're looking to ship Civ3 in December, so (given that I started in mid-September), there's no time left to even think about it. That said, you can probably use the old MacSoft editor to create scenarios that will run in the new versions.
Simultaneously with this, I'm working on Civ4, which just started shipping in the last week or so. I'm going to try and post more about the development process for it if I can, since it looks pretty representative of what a modern game port involves.