Wolfenstein RPG, Quake 3 Porting to iPhone

Last summer, id Software’s programming guru John Carmack said that the iPhone was capable of graphics that we’ve seen from the PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

"The iPhone, as a device, is in the same generation power-wise as the PS2 or Xbox," said Carmack in July 2008. "The graphics are a little lower but the RAM is a lot higher. … You could easily spend $10 million on an iPhone game, but the market just can’t support that yet.”

"We wanted to do something for the iPhone, but we just didn’t have the scheduling or the resources available," he said. "I really regret not having something at launch."

With id Software busy making its next game, Rage, for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, there still hasn’t been an iPhone game from the developer. Thanks to help from partner companies, familiar id Software licenses will soon hit Apple’s mobile device.

Carmack told MTV Multiplayer blog that an upgraded version of Wolfenstein RPG, just released for BREW and Java platforms, will be “coming out maybe a month or so from now” with upgraded graphics and sound.

Another unannounced title is also in the works, made specifically for the iPhone, Carmack revealed: “We have another title, which isn’t announced formally, and we’ve 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 it’s very graphically impressive but we don’t have an official release date for it yet. We’re having various challenges with that development.”

Another id title that could hit the device is a port of Quake III Arena, (which was just reborn this week for web browsers in the Quake Live public beta).

“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,” explained Carmack. “And I’ve 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.”