id Software legend John Carmack says
Quake III is being tested on iPhone, and might include
Quake Live's level upgrades if launched as a product.
Doom and
Quake creator id has
already confirmed that
Wolfenstein RPG is coming to the iPhone, converted from other mobile devices.
But Carmack talked to Gamasutra about his experimental work on Apple's handheld while
discussing the launch of Quake Live, which is based on
Quake III and debuted as a browser-based multiplayer game yesterday.
Discussing the renderer for
Quake Live itself, Carmack noted:
"It's interesting, because I am kind of poking through the
Quake III codebase on the iPhone right now, for some after-hours work a couple of us are doing. I'm going to have to go in and make some serious renderer changes to get that up to the performance that I want."
Later in the interview, when asked more directly about possibilities for
Quake III and other id products on the iPhone, Carmack explained:
"I could go on for a long time, again, just about the iPhone stuff. We've got a couple things going on on that [including
Wolfenstein RPG], and some things have not gone great with our working with outside companies on it.
But there are several of us that are poking around in our somewhat after-hours and discretionary time on things. It's kind of exciting to look at that. We're working with a more vanilla
Quake III codebase.
But now that I'm thinking about all this stuff, if we turned this into a product, even if it's not part of the
Quake Live framework, we'll probably go in and pick up all the tweaks and changes to the core gameplay and the levels that have been developed for
Quake Live."
The rest of
Carmack and Marty Stratton's interview on Quake Live is now available to read on Gamasutra, including lots more on technical underpinnings and design considerations for the browser-based multiplayer title.
