id's Carmack Talks Quake III iPhone Experiments

Author: by Staff, Chris Remo

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.