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Carmack wants Rage iPhone game

He's busy working on Doom 4 these days.

id Software's John Carmack has said he hopes to do a Rage game for iPhone, and spoken a little more about the developer's plans for the Apple format.

"I want to work on a Rage-themed game to coincide with Rage's release [on PC, Mac and console], but we don't have a firm direction or team chosen for it," Carmack wrote in his release notes for Doom Classic, which launched recently.

"I was very excited about doing a really-designed-for-the-iPhone first-person shooter, but at this point I am positive that I don't have the time available for it."

That's not to say id will be giving up on the iPhone though - far from it. While Carmack is "now working downstairs at id with the Doom 4 team" and splitting his time between that and Rage, the developer now has two people "dedicated to iPhone work".

"I doubt I will be able to personally open Xcode again for a few months, but I do plan on trying to work out a good touch interface for Quake Classic and the later 6DOF games," Carmack added.

"I also very much want to make at least a tech demo that can run media created with a version of our idTech 5 megatexture content-creation pipeline. I'm not sure exactly what game I would like to do with it, so it might be a 500MB free gee-whiz app..."

In the immediate future, Carmack said not to expect free versions of future products ("since we didn't notice anything worth the effort with Wolfenstein, and other developers have reported similar findings"), and that Doom Classic would be supported with updates, while work has also begun on an iPhone-specific version of Doom 2 RPG.

"The real-time FPS games are never going to be enjoyable for a lot of people [on iPhone]," Carmack explained, "and the turn-based RPG games are pretty neat in many regards. If they are well received, we will probably bring over the Orcs & Elves games as well."