David Hasselhoff is busy. It seems like he is always busy. He has just flown into London, ostensibly as part of a promotional tour for his new iPhone game, Hoff Zombie Beach, but he has a lot of other stuff to promote too. In one 15-minute phone conversation, we cover enough ongoing projects to keep any mortal celebrity busy for years. But this is The Hoff. He doesn’t really do mortal.

“I just got done a couple of days with Seth McFarlane on Ted 2,” he says breathlessly almost as soon as our call connects. “It’s a really funny bit - we both had a hand in writing it. It’s a very warped sense of humour, but it’s very funny.”

His game, it turns out, has its origins three years ago when Sony asked the ex-Knight Rider and Baywatch star to appear in a trailer for the PlayStation title DanceStar Party. They wanted him to create a “Dance Hoff”, showing his best moves for players to copy. “I told them I’m a terrible dancer, but they said, ‘that’s why we chose you’. I did the goofiest dances I could.

“The guys who were there, I saw their technology and animation, I said, ‘hey, let’s do a Hoff Around the World game, like Where’s Wally’. So we started developing a game together, and came up with zombies. I mean, we all love zombies. I think I’d just watched Zombieland. So we decided to have zombies invading Venice Beach. And actually if you go to Venice Beach there really are quite a few zombies wandering around that place, trying to figure out which way the sky is, completely out of it.”

“We’ve got Pamela Anderson as a zombie and a few others you’ll recognise. It’s an easy game, it’s just fun. I’m shooting zombies but they’re not really dead. They come back. My secret weapon is my horrible voice. When I sing really loud, everyone explodes.”

One thing you learn very quickly about David Hasslehoff is that he understands his brand. He understands that he is a sort of hyper-real construct, a walking post-modern smorgasbord of ironic memes and pop culture jokes. Every “acting” role he has done, and every cheesy 80s rock ballad he has recorded, is always being telegraphed directly from his ego. Describing the set up of Zombie Beach, he says, “so Mitch Buchannon comes rolling in and gets out of the Knight Rider car... we have no shame, we’ll use whatever we can.”

I ask if he plays video games. “I used to,” he says. “I played Centipede, Space Invaders, Asteroids … My girlfriend is constantly on that memory game, Dots. I’m too busy working, buddy. I was sitting next to another celebrity on the plane over and he was playing solitaire for hours. I thought, I don’t want to do that, I want to starting working on my next movie!

“I’m at a point right now where I have some new music coming out, I have two movies including Killing Hasselhoff, which I produced - it’s a comedy about a celebrity death pool; one guy decides to chase me. He hires a hitman who happens to be in love with David Hasselhoff. We’re just going to do whatever comes along.”

And something else that’s come along is 3D printing. This month, David Hasselhoff the businessman announced that he was investing in a new concept from start-up Things3D – a sort of 3D-celebrity-selfie generator. “You go into a booth, it scans you and you can walk out with a Hoff figure or Pamela Anderson or any celebrity you want,” he explains.

“We’re just beginning the licensing process, but it’s going to be huge. I mean, I can see these things at football games - you could have a doll of yourself holding the trophy with your favourite star. We’re just closing the patent on that. It’s amazing. And it takes just a second to scan you. I went in to the booth with a Baywatch jacket on and did a cheesy pose – I had to go cheesy of course.”

He obviously then tweeted the resulting figure to his adoring fanbase:

Similarly to the Skylanders and Disney Infinity figures, the Smartselfies as they’re known, will contain a chip allowing owners to transfer data on to them. Perhaps you could create a doll of you embracing a favourite popstar, then upload their song into the figure, before sending it to a friend. Or maybe it could interact with a dedicated smartphone or tablet app. the details are vague. David Hasselhoff doesn’t really do details.

Hoff and history

There’s one other thing he’s promoting: Hasselhoff Vs. The Berlin Wall, which despite the name, is not another video game. Screening on the National Geographic channel, it is of course a documentary which sees the star returning to the city where, 25 years ago, he performed his song Looking for Freedom as the wall fell. He wore a jacket with lights on it. If you saw it, you’ll remember – possibly despite strenuous efforts to forget.

“It’s was a really surreal time,” he says. “My song was number one for eight weeks over the summer, and for that New Year’s Eve, they called me and asked if I’d sing it on a big television show - I said, ‘yeah, only if I can sing it on the wall’. I was joking, I would have gone anyway, but they said okay. It was the most incredible moment. It was people celebrating freedom, families who hadn’t seen each other for years.

In the documentary, Hasslehoff visits the tunnels dug under the wall and meets people who successfully escaped to the West of the city. “I met two men who ziplinned across the wall, then flipped the bird at the guards,” he says. “I also met three brothers who flew over in ultralights – they showed me where they landed. They offered to fly me over in the in the original ultralights, but I said no, I think I’ll pass on that.”

Finally then, we have found the thing that David Hasselhoff will not do in the name of entertainment. He will make video games, he will resurrect his singing career, he will produce films in which he is an assassination target, he will make small 3D printed versions of himself. But he absolutely will not fly over Berlin in a historical re-enactment. Although, if they’d have customised the ultralight to look like the Knight Rider car, he’d have been up there in a flash.

Hoff Zombie Beach is available to download now on the App Store. Hasselhoff Vs. The Berlin Wall airs Tuesday 4 November 9pm on National Geographic Channel.