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Last Thursday, the good folks at Feral Interactive announced they’d be publishing Sid Meier’s Pirates! for the Mac. Having been a huge fan of the game back in its Apple IIGS incarnation, I was both surprised and thrilled with the announcement. What I found most intriguing, however, was the announcement that Sid Meier’s Pirates! was being published as part of the “Feral Legends Series,” of which I’d previously heard no mention. So, immediately after posting the announcement, I got in contact with Brad Gibson at Feral to see if he could tell me a bit more about what this Legends Series entails.

My first question, of course, regarded volume. If your first game in a new series is a Mac version of a PC title updated for release in 2004, I’m immediately leaping all the way back to the 90s for a list of games that never made it our way, but certainly should have. So, does Feral have plenty of games in mind already, or is Pirates! just an experiment to see how well these older titles do?

“The Feral Legends series is a new label for Feral,” Brad replied. “I wouldn’t call it an ‘experiment.’ We do plan on the line being a continuing and growing area. We can’t say now what other titles are coming or exactly how many. What I can say is that we have strong plans for its future.”

Sid Meier’s Pirates! is certainly a strong way to start. Considering this, I wanted to know how this whole project came about. Was the Feral Legends label launched because they had a game like Pirates!, or was it because of the idea for the label that they sought out Pirates!?

“It was more of the former and not the latter,” Brad explained. “We felt that there were a number of titles that fit under an umbrella of ‘classic games.’ These would be games we want to differentiate from newer titles, as they’ve grown an image of popularity and fame.”

Of course, “popularity and fame” translates into “games that sold well,” but that’s always a crap shoot with Mac ports. Games that were huge hits earlier in the decade could well have been products of the time, could now be extremely dated, or could have been bypassed by better games already available on the Mac. So, what other factors came into play? Personal recommendations from the Feral crew (or their porting partners)? Game age? Fan requests? My personal hopes and dreams?

At this question, Brad politely pleaded the Fifth. “I can’t get into the details of what makes a ‘Legend.’ It’s really a balance of a number of factors.”

Not good enough for me, so I pressed on. And although Brad was polite as he continued to deflect my questions about what else we’d be seeing, I could tell even through his e-mails that he was doing so through clenched teeth. So, the conversation ended there, with us knowing only that Sid Meier’s Pirates! will be hitting the Mac this month, but that Feral does have bigger plans for the Feral Legends Series.

That won’t stop me from speculating, though. Just how far back is Feral willing to go? Are they looking solely at PC games, or will they consider porting Mac OS Classic games to OS X? If so, will they look only at their own titles, or towards other Mac publishers, as well? Will Mac gamers finally get to suffer through Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, the sequel to the worst computer game to ever reach the Macintosh? I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but I’m fine with that. Come late August, I have a feeling I’m going to be fairly distracted, anyway.

Meanwhile, what do you think? Are there any games you’ve been dying to see make it to the Macintosh over the years? Let us know in the comments below.