For example, i'd LOVE copies of these two old Impressions games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_the_Realm I realize part of the issue is navigating the IP, but there's so much potential here. What's the holdup?!
I would be super stoked to pay whatever was charged for the first two fallout games. I think they're available on steam now even. Portable fallout would be the best thing to happen to the AppStore, in my opinion.
I would love to see the original Dungeon Master. Update the graphics, change the dungeon if needed, but leave all the core mechanics exactly as they were. Turn based, having to find food, hard, and complex puzzles. Grimlok is on its way (and a fantastic game, but give me my large amount of spells, and let me be turnbased) Gabriel Knight, the adventure game. They have remade broken sword, so GK should be possible. Planescape Torment. As it had a fantastic story. And while we are at it, can somebody make a turn based strategy Like Joan D’Arc, and The 3ds shadow Gunner (shadow something). Where you only control four to six characters, and they all have their own personalities. Highborn is great, and i reccomend it, but could do with one with a little oomph.
It's probably harder than you imagine to actually make that kind of project a reality. For me it's already a challenge to go back to a code-base from one or two years ago, so going back and picking up something created by some one else 18 years ago is not appealing. It'd probably even be a challenge to port those games to a state of modern Windows compliance let alone another platform entirely. Original team members would most likely be unavailable, meaning a company would have to take a production team away from any current/new projects and have them navigate a bunch of code and assets with little chance of anyone around to provide any knowledge or guidance. Add all of that to the fact that porting games can already be challenging even in ideal conditions. Even changing user input form mouse to touch can be surprisingly non-trivial, especially if the input responds to mouse rollovers and tracks the cursor position, as those don't exist on a touch device. Which isn't to say it couldn't be done, but throw in some legal mess to untangle, and potentially pre-spoken-for royalty slices, and I can imagine the appeal dropping. We are getting some ports here and there though. Baldur's Gate for example fits the description. I'd only expect it for really popular stuff though. Correct me if I'm wrong - but despite having (admittedly moderate) exposure to pc/amiga games in the early 90s, I haven't played or heard of (or can't remember) Detroit or Lords of the Realm, so I'd have to guess they weren't as big as Baldur's Gate eventually became.
Multiplang about nailed it for the general case. This is what we did comercially for a long time before going Indie and it's highly specialised (read: unpleasant). There's another issue though, probably the biggest. Most iOS games make very little money even for indies, so it's probably a fair bet that most of the IP holders would rather pass on getting paid a trivial sum, in return for avoiding any negative press arising from a badly done port.
