Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 30, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
John Carmack, co-founder and head of the well-known US game-development studio id Software, had already indicated some time ago that he intended to focus more strongly on game programming for portable devices. In an interview with the US magazine Forbes, the developer, regarded as one of the inventors of the first-person shooter genre, has now provided more details about those plans. Carmack is particularly interested in the iPhone. In performance terms, he described the Apple device as a “wide-open field” especially well suited as a video-game platform. The id Software founder can even readily imagine developing an MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) for portable devices. Carmack envisions a system that begins as a simple network game and is gradually expanded into a complete MMOG.
“The iPhone is a device whose performance is on the same level as a PlayStation 2 or an Xbox,” Carmack says. Although the achievable graphics quality is somewhat lower, the smartphone has considerably more memory than those consoles. He says it is very unfortunate that the company did not manage to have a suitable game ready when the iPhone launched. “We desperately wanted to develop something for the iPhone, but we simply did not have the right schedule or sufficient resources,” Carmack explains. Nevertheless, id Software is already working at full speed on an exclusive iPhone game. “The title will be a graphical showpiece, but I will not disclose any further information,” Carmack says.
“Alongside online gaming, mobile gaming is the second future market for the games industry,” Stephan Reichart, Managing Director of the German game developers’ association G.A.M.E., tells pressetext.de. Although the boom in mobile-phone games predicted years ago has not yet materialized to the expected extent, he says the sector’s future remains very bright. “Thanks to current developments such as Nokia’s N-Gage portal, new high-end devices such as the iPhone, increasingly fast data connections and the growing availability of suitable flat-rate plans, the mobile-games market will be able to triple its revenue to around €200 million by 2010,” Reichart believes. The iPhone’s potential as a video-game platform is particularly great. “Not least because of its exciting interface, the iPhone offers terrific possibilities for new game concepts,” Reichart says.
Over the past two years, id Software has developed three different mobile-phone games which, according to the company, have already sold two million copies. Carmack says a fourth title, “Wolfenstein RPG,” will follow in autumn 2008. Overall, however, the US developer’s mobile-games division has so far achieved limited success. “The original plan was to release new games on mobile phones and then move them to other, larger consoles,” Carmack explains. With the exception of his company’s first mobile game, “Orcs and Elves,” this has not yet succeeded. “Projects like this still have to be approached very carefully today. You could easily spend ten million dollars on an iPhone game, but the market would not support that at present,” Carmack cautions.
