MTV Multiplayer: And id is currently working on a title exclusive to iPhone?
Carmack: We actually have a lot of things going on with the iPhone now. We have two commercial projects that are closing in on done. Weve taken one of our traditional mobile games, Wolfenstein RPG which was just released on the BREW and Java platforms. And we have a spiffied-up iPhone version which has hi-res graphics, sound and 3D acceleration and all that on there. Its pretty neat. That will be coming out maybe a month or so from now. But its not a designed-from-the-ground-up-for-the-iPhone game. We have another title, which isnt announced formally, and weve been working with a partner company here locally in Dallas, that is designed from scratch for the iPhone but using some existing id assets on there. And its very graphically impressive but we dont have an official release date for it yet. Were having various challenges with that development. But literally before I came in on this interview, I was going around poking with some of our old titles. Im really looking forward to bringing over an id classics line start with Wolfenstein 3D and go through Doom and Quake and bring pretty much all of them over to the iPhone because Im a really big booster of the platform. And it frustrates me to no end that here we are without product yet shipping in the iPhone. Weve had a couple of thwarted attempts at different things. Im frustrated about it and trying to do something about it. [laughs]
MTV Multiplayer: So that one particular iphone title you mentioned that youre having trouble with is that the one that will potentially be a Wii title?
Carmack: Yes, it could possibly lead into it. Not directly from that, but a very similar concept for something. And I know thats very cryptic. [laughs] But we havent made an official announcements about it because weve had some difficulties during the development. And we dont want to announce something and then retract it. We want to make sure it turns out good before we actually talk about it.
MTV Multiplayer: Can you talk about some of the challenges youve been having on that iPhone title?
Carmack: Well, the developer that were working with doesnt necessarily have the experience in some of these things that were looking at. Im budgeting some time for me to spend a significant chunk of time putting my
theres things that Im going to be doing to help out the project. But I cant budget enough time that I can guarantee that I can do everything myself, so theres still questions about how its going to turn out.
MTV Multiplayer: Have you seen the ports of Quake to iPhone? What are your thoughts on those?
Carmack: Yeah, and the other thing that Im working on for the iPhone several things at once on this [platform]. We have Quake III up and running on the iPhone. It needs a new redesign of the render to make it fast enough to be really good playing on the iPhone. And Ive got this interesting decision about it here. If we take all that around, we may go back and take all the changes that the Quake Live team has done from the original code base and make more of a modern Quake III Arena based on the Quake Live work. Which would be pretty cool.
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