"My relationship with Apple has been long standing, but it's a rollercoaster ride," he told Kotaku. "I'll be invited up on stage for a keynote one month and then I'll say something they don't like and I can be blacklisted for six months."

Working with Apple on iPhone games has been no different, Carmack said, but he is happy to see that former collaborator Graeme Devine is now working at Apple in the iPhone Game Technologies division.

Devine worked at id Software from 1999 to 2003, producing and programming on a number of games including Quake III, Doom 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Devine went on to Ensemble Studios where he worked on Age of Empires 3 and Halo Wars before that studio was shut down.

Earlier this year he moved to Apple.

"Graeme Devine is in a significant position as a game developer at Apple," Carmack said. "I have a real man on the inside now. We knew each other from way back in the day.

"He's a real developer and I understand everything he is saying."

Devine's role at Apple doesn't mean that Carmack's dealings with the company has gotten any less bumpy though. Doom Classic was rejected twice before Apple allowed it to appear in the store with some minor changes.

Carmack thinks the run-ins with Apple are because the company, the highest people in the company, look down on games. But the popularity of gaming on the iPhone has forced Apple to try and come to grips with that, even if they're not happy about it.

"At the highest level of Apple, in their heart of hearts," Carmack said, "they're not proud of the iPhone being a game machine, they wish it was something else."

"It's not cast in stone yet, but at this point no, we don't think we will have dedicated servers," he said, according to Variety. But he's glad "we won't have to be a pioneer on that. We'll see how it works out for everyone else."

News that Infinity Ward was dropping dedicated server support in favor of everyone playing online through its new matchmaking service IWNet touched, off, predictably, a petition-fueled backlash from a PC community that had long used dedicated servers to play Call of Duty games. Carmack, Variety said, indicated the felt the servers are a relic of PC gaming's early days.

Dedicated Servers and Rage - News You Probably Don't Want to Hear [Variety]

"Wolfenstein Classic was my original experiment on whether a first-person shooter would be any fun on the iPhone," he said. "It did surprisingly well for all of us."

So well, in fact, that Carmack finds himself spending a disproportionate amount of his time working on future iPhone games. Already id Software has released Wolfenstein Classic, Wolfenstein RPG, Doom Resurrection and this week Doom Classic.

Carmack said that there was a lot of "hand wringing" initially over the idea of spending the company's own money (there was no publisher to help fund development) on making games for the iPhone. Doom Resurrection, when it hit, was probably the most expensive game to develop for the iPhone, Carmack says.

But that internal concern quickly disappeared when Wolfenstein Classic hit the App Store.

"It did really well for us," he said. "It was Wolfenstein Classic that made the argument for iPhone development for me. We made quite a bit of money off of that."

After its success Carmack and id Software decided to launch a three-prong approach to iPhone development, working on classic remakes, role-playing titles and original games.

With only a few games out for the platform so far, each game gives Carmack a chance to experiment with development and the technology, he said.

While Doom Classic's touch controls may seem very similar to those found in Wolfenstein Classic, Carmack says there's quite a big difference.

" There were some important changes, like the virtual stick autocentering, changes to precise ramping of movement," he said.

The game also introduces a new control option that allows gamers to turn around in the game by spinning a virtual wheel. But only six months into iPhone game development, Carmack says he already finds himself "hamstrung" by people's expectations of controls set by his previous games.

"We're still feeling out what will play well and what people will like," he said.

Next up for Carmack is Quake Classic, it will be the first shooter that id Software releases for the iPhone that will include the ability to look up and down, not just side to side.

I pointed out that some in the gaming and development community have suggested that both Doom and Wolfenstein Classic control so well because they don't need to worry about up and down controls.

Carmack said that while adding another axis of control is tricky, it would be wrong to dismiss what the current games have accomplished.

"There is an excellent experiment that can be done here," he said. "Play the jail broken Doom and the one I worked on. There is obviously a large difference here. You can be dismissive of the game, that there is a limited control input set, but there is a lot of work that goes into that.

"Everything that has a 32-bit processor has had Doom ported to it, you can run it on a toaster, but it takes a lot of work and care to turn it into something you would choose to play. I had people showing me FPS apps while I was working on Wolfenstein, and they were all atrocious."

Carmack says that it is possible that a fully controlled first-person shooter just isn't in the cards for the iPhone, but he won't really know until he's developed Quake Classic. After that he plans to work on Quake 2 for the iPhone.

"I'm not sure if after Quake 2 I want to do Quake Arena or Quake Live for the iPhone," he said.

The problem is that while Quake Live has better levels it would require WiFi to play online. That's because 3G just won't cut it for Carmack.

"I was originally excited about 3G," he said. "I was told it could have 180 pings, but when I tested it, it was twice that. It was not usable."

While the Classics' line seems fairly mapped out, Carmack isn't as sure about the RPG and original games coming from the developer. He says that the next RPG game will be Doom 2 RPG and if that does well they will move on to the Orcs and Elves RPG games.

The only other original game announced by id Software is one that will be based on their upcoming PC title Rage, but that doesn't mean there aren't others in the works. In particular Carmack is interesting in getting parent company Bethesda interested in bringing some of their games over to the iPhone.

"I spent a bit of time talking to Todd Howard about the iPhone," he said. "We want to make something happen for those products as well."

An obvious choice would be Fallout, something that Carmack says has already had internal proof of concepts made. But nothing has yet officially happened with the game.

Carmack says that Howard, a big fan of the iPhone, is very supportive of the idea and that anything made based on Bethesda's games would likely be created as a joint project between id and Bethesda.

He added that he would be involved in making the game most likely, but that his time is "overloaded badly right now".

"At the very least I'm going to be providing code," he said.

While more people are being brought on to help with iPhone development at id Software, it's clear that Carmack wants to stay involved with the growing business.

"I've had tons of fun working on it as a platform,"he said. "I carry an iPhone around with me as my regular phone all of the time. It's like carrying around a dev kit in my pocket."

The $7 game, designed by John Carmack, features customizable control schemes, 36 levels spread across four episodes, a bounty of weapons and multiplayer support.

Here's the full break-down of game features:
Play the legendary first person shooter, DOOM, with an iPhone or iPod Touch
Fight through 36 missions in four action-packed episodes: Knee-Deep in the Dead, Shores of Hell, Inferno and Thy Flesh Consumed
Experience DOOM multiplayer on your mobile device, including Deathmatch and Cooperative play for up to four players via wireless internet
Choose from three different control types and customize the interface to suit your style
Explore the depths of Mars while utilizing the top down map to help your journey and save your game on the fly
Listen to the original soundtrack or disable it and use your own iPod music

Armadillo's Scorpius craft is the first in a field of entrants to successfully complete the requirements laid out by NASA, which involved ascending 164 feet, flying to a spot 164 feet away, landing, taking off then flying back to where it started. If neither of the two competing craft can satisfy the requirements by October 31, Armadillo will scoop the prize by default, which stands at a cool $1 million.

And after the cash? Next stop, space.

"Since the Lunar Lander Challenge is quite demanding in terms of performance, with a few tweaks our Scorpius vehicle actually has the capability to travel all the way to space," says Carmack.

"We'll be moving quickly to do higher-altitude tests, and we can go up to about 6000 feet here at our home base in Texas before we'll have to head to New Mexico where we can really push the envelope. We already have scientific payloads from universities lined up to fly as well, so this will be an exciting next few months for commercial spaceflight."

John Carmack's Armadillo Finally Wins Lunar Landing Challenge [Gizmodo]

Carmack, ever the programmer, didn't immediately tell me what his sunset would be. Instead, after I described Kojima's desire, the legendary Doom programmer responded as follows:

"You could totally do a good job of that today," he said. "You could do all the post-processing effects and the color biasing, and you could run through all of that and it would be a bunch of work. But, if somebody said: 'Go give me a glorious, evocative sunset,' I might say, 'Nah, we've got more important things to be working on.' But we could totally do it."

My conversation with Kojima had taken place in April of 2006, in his work apartment in Tokyo, a couple of blocks from Kojima Productions' offices. He was still making Metal Gear Solid IV then and recalled, through a translator, the limitations of early game consoles. The more primitive machines had challenged him to achieve his goals.

"How can we give users a feeling of walking [by a] beautiful sunset with 16 colors?" Kojima remembered wondering. "That was what we were trying to aim for as designers at that time...A couple of years from now, maybe games will have an implementation of scent or touch or feeling. And then I'll want to probably implement that in to meet my final goal. So I think this will be a never-ending story. And, well, I think that's OK, because that's what creation is all about."

Ever since that interview, I wondered if other video game creators had their own sunsets, their own goals that they hoped their talent and the world's technology would enable them to attain.

During our conversation in Texas a couple of Thursdays ago, I asked Carmack a second time if he did have a sunset. "I really don't think there's something I look at in my mind and say: 'This is what we're striving for,'" he said. "There is lots of stuff that I know are not done particularly well, with different levels of ambient occlusion and distributed light sources… I went through a phase of this at the beginning of [id's next big game,] Rage — the graphics geeky stuff of "'Oh, I'm doing shaped highlights." Or, you know, \I'm doing parallax mapping. I'm doing this or that.'"

Carmack's lighting experiments didn't motivate him to do more, he explained. But I was worried Carmack was still taking my question too literally. I feared he thought I only wanted to know about actual sunsets rather than metaphorical ones. But he wasn't just talking about sunsets, after all, as he proved to me right before we wrapped up our conversation about this stuff.

"I did some demos [of those lighting technologies in Rage] and it's just not that big of a deal," he said. "Maybe if you put them together, lump them all together, you get something that comes out and makes you say: 'This is a big step above.' But there's not many little things that matter that much anymore in terms of a game. If you're trying to do a simulation, there's tons of stuff that you can continue to do better. … In terms of what's going to matter to a person playing a game, there's not massive stuff to be done. We're going to continue going; we're going to continue making it. But it's past the v of the curve. The more important stuff is making sure that it's going to be easier and faster to do better stuff like this."

If John Carmack has a Kojima sunset in his mind, it's one that involves speedier processes for creating video games. But there's no thing, no object, no emotion the veteran game creator seems burning to create.

I left the interview wondering: What are the sunsets for the rest of the industry's video game creators?

[Amazing sunset pic]

"There is a lot of good to be said about Epic and Valve and the tacks that they've taken," Carmack told me during an interview in Dallas last week during QuakeCon. "They've both grown to be much bigger companies than id Software was.

"And, you know, somebody could look at this and say I held id back, because I did not want to grow the company into a really big company at those times. And maybe we would have been better off to do that, but we came off pretty good, so I'm not going to kick myself over any of that."

Today, id largely makes its graphics tech for its own games. It's previous graphics engine, id Tech 4, powered few of the industry's games. The next one, id Tech 5, is first and foremost being developed for id's own next big game, Rage. It's companies such as Epic that make the graphics engines that power so many games on the market.

Earlier this decade, id Tech 3, the graphics technology used in Quake III Arena, was widely licensed in the industry, used in games like EA's James Bond Everything or Nothing and the first Call of Duty. At the time, Carmack told me, id didn't have the support team to handle a wide number of licensees. "Our technology license stuff was, 'Ok you pay this and you can have eight hours of technical support," Carmack recalled. "You can come down and talk to me for eight hours. Mostly it's, you're on your own, because we didn't have support staff."

To do that better and for more game companies, id would have to grow. Carmack didn't want that. "We knew that we didn't want to have the big support staff like they have for things. And I didn't want to give away the kind of freedom. When you have 50 licensees on stuff like that, you are handcuffed."

Carmack couldn't tolerate having to accommodate the need to minimize his own programming efforts in order to not shift code too much and unsettle the other companies relying on the same tech. "The work I'm doing now on id Tech 5 is changing some fundamental class hierarchy stuff across all of our resources, and it's the right thing to do. It's better, because of that. It's incredibly painful just doing it in our codebase. There's no way I would contemplate doing that if I had 50 other development teams that would have to go through and make similar changes on there."

Money left on the table? Perhaps, Carmack said. "It's a good business on there. We did great on the Quake III generation, tons and tons of licenses on that. But it does tie up your arms a little bit technically and it does mean you're out of the game business and you're in the technology supplier business. There are aspects to that that are admirable. There's definitely a part of me that, as an engineer, says it would be great to try and document this really well, try and clean it up and make it as good as you possibly can, because there's always this balance between making something really good code and rapidly exploring as many things as you can on there."

Let the Epics and Valves sweat that stuff, he is happy to conclude. Let them worry about making sure Unreal Engine 3, Source or whatever else works for all the companies that pay to use it.

"I don't gainsay anybody their success," he said. "I'm happy to see everybody doing good work on there. I think it's great to see Epic and Valve doing their thing. I like the industry. I like seeing the industry being vibrant and competitive. "

Carmack made those comments on Thursday, during the id co-founder's QuakeCon 2009 keynote speech in Dallas (aka the event that spawned the Longest Liveblog In Kotaku History).

Early in his address, he admitted that Quake Live, the multiplayer in-browser web re-make of Quake III Arena that went into open beta early this year, was not up to id's standard yet. Leaderboards and more community functionality around the game need to be improved, he said. Later, he fielded a question from the audience about the future of the game.

Carmack said he did not think the game could survive on Internet advertising alone, the only revenue-generator currently in place. Instead, he believes it will be necessary for the financial well-being of the project to offer a premium version of the game, which might allow players to host games on their own servers. Web ads won't suffice.

The Quake Live project is grander than Carmack said he had envisioned, which may be as much a factor in spurring this need for player payment as a weak online ad market. But the game, at its base, will remain free, he noted.

Carmack said the "beta" tag will be removed from the game soon, as problems with leaderboards and other tech are resolved. Mac and Linux versions are planned to go live this coming week.

Early in his talk Carmack said that the next year would prove whether Quake Live is a success. Later, when answering that audience question, he said the game wouldn't be able to be deemed a failure for two years. He hopes such a pronouncement won't be necessary, of course.

He said the game has been popular, with half of those who register for it returning to play it at least once a month.

This experiment will continue, with some tinkering that users may need to pay for.

He thinks that Sony could release a new console before Microsoft. Here's his rationale: "The whole jockeying for who's going to release the first next gen console is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of things," he says. "Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely. As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We'd like to see it be quite a few more years before the next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later."

Sony has repeatedly stated that the PS3's lifespan is ten years. The console came out in 2006 in Japan, which means that Sony is not expected to release a new console until 2016 or 2017. With the buzz around Project Natal, Microsoft has recently been talking about a longer shelf life for the Xbox 360.

But, all of this is still unconfirmed and merely speculation on Carmack's part. In the rest of the link below, Carmack offers his opinion about more futurey stuff as well.

Carmack talks next gen consoles... and beyond [Digital Foundry via GamesIndustry]

In what's becoming a frustrating norm for PS3 owners, id's John Carmack has told Edge magazine that while the PC and 360 versions of Rage are running at a smooth 60 frames per second, the PS3 version is managing barely half that, clocking in at only 20-30 fps.

"The PS3 lags a little bit behind in terms of getting the performance out of it," Carmack explains. "The rasteriser is just a little bit slower - no two ways about that."

"The RSX is slower than what we have in the 360. The CPU is about the same, but the 360 makes it easier to split things off, and that's what a lot of the work has been, splitting it all into jobs on the PS3".

Shame. You'd think nearly three years into the console's lifespan, someone would have figured out a way around this by now. Unless, you know, there is no way around it.

Carmack: Rage runs faster on Xbox 360 [Edge, via CVG]

As a matter of fact, Wolfenstein RPG has been completed for quite some time. As id's John Carmark explains it, his excitement over getting Wolfenstein 3D Classic on the iPhone screwed up EA's release plans a little bit.

"I was disappointed that EA decided to sit on it, but they kinda freaked out when I did the Wolfenstein 3D Classic, as it wasn't a carefully planned thing...I just thought "Hey, This is cool and fun, let's release it!" That blew their planned rollout - they were worried about selling people two Wolfenstein titles at once. Hopefully they'll release it soon."

In the meantime, id Mobile is working on finishing the Doom II RPG for cell phones, after which they'll be doing that for the iPhone. Carmack himself is running the classics line, which will see the release of Doom, Quake, Quake II, Quake III, and then there will be more from scratch titles. One game he mentioned specifically was Rage, which would be "a destruction action thing".

Finally, Carmack is interested in creating a technical proof of concept for running the idTech 5 megatexture content creation pipeline on the 3GS, simply to warm the technology up and see what the more powerful device can handle.

All of that, plus working on id's big titles? It doesn't seem like John Carmack has plans to slow down any time soon.

id Software's John Carmack is one of the masterminds behind some of the greatest first-person shooters of all time, often referred to as a father of the entire genre for his work on games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. Lately, however, John has been taking id's properties in different directions, creating a roleplaying game version of Doom and now this title, Doom Resurrection for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The game began as a test. Carmack supervised the development, which was carried out by the team at Escalation Studios, in order to see what sort of iPhone game could be created using more resources and a larger budget than your average iPhone title. That is the reason we didn't hear about the game until earlier this month - Carmack wanted to make sure they had a viable product.

Gamers will of course question the viability of a game that takes one of the world's greatest first-person shooters and transforms it into a simple rail shooter. Carmack addresses such concerns, explaining that sometimes freedom must be sacrificed for the greater good.

"Freedom is great. There's no doubt about it that one of the major aspects of FPSs is that you're exploring this world and if you want to you can look down between the cracks in the floor and see something cool...but in a high-end game we can spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars creating this awesome thing only to have the player turn their head the other way and never seeing it. That's extraordinarily frustrating

"That's what we traded off in this game. You don't have the free roaming freedom...but it guarantees that the game will always look good."

Despite Carmack's clear vision for Doom Resurrection, another issue reared its ugly head in the middle of the development cycle that nearly caused him to pull the plug entirely. The game originally featured the standard shooter controls we've come to know and grudgingly deal with in an iPhone shooter, with the player touching the screen to shoot.

The game still looked great, but there was never a challenge...and therefore it wasn't fun. The player's thumb would cover the screen, and it really didn't feel like you were inside the experience. On the verge of scrapping the project, Escalation came up with the solution - the accelerometer.

"It was only halfway through the project, after I had already served notice that we were going to scrap the project that (Escalation) completely scrapped that control metaphor and came up with this different paradigm where you aim with the accelerometer, tilting around. It was am overnight difference, where build one I was about to scrap the project, and build two, all of the sudden we were still a long way from done but it had that kernel - this is a game we could make fun."

How confident is Carmack? So confident that he believe that imitators will soon start showing, with the accelerometer aiming technique perhaps becoming the default control scheme for iPhone shooters.

So now the game is on the verge of release, and players will be able to get their hands on Doom Resurrection for the first time. What can you expect? Well it depends on which iPhone you have. Carmack noted that the original iPhone experienced significant slowdown but was still playable; the iPhone 3G offered a very smooth experience, and the game runs like butter on the 3GS, with improved loading times to boot.

Smooth gameplay and low loading times will also be a boon in the coming weeks and months, as id gears up to add multiplayer support to the title, starting with 2-player cooperative peer-to-peer, with Elevation looking to extend that to 4-player competitive in the future. Unfortunately the game was too far into development when the 3.0 software was introduced, but the features will be patched n, with new downloadable level being looked at as well.

It's probably best to look at Doom Resurrection not as a version of Doom for the iPhone, but as something completely different with a familiar look and feel. id and the team at Escalation have made some bold choices with the title, and should they pay off it could very well lead to other developers devoting more resources and bigger-budgets to iPhone titles in the future.

The estranged game designer, who's no longer with id and currently developing iPhone games, tweeted this: "ZENIMAX??????? Disgusting." He followed that up an hour later with "Fallout 3 bought DOOM. Wow."

Romero is known for coining the term "deathmatch" and the disastrous Daikatana ad campaign. That, and having amazing hair.

Id co-founder John Carmack, id CEO Todd Hollenshead and ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman told Kotaku that the purchase will change none of the principles or principals of id and Bethesda but will allow id to grow like it never has before.

We've contacted Romero to clarify, but have yet to receive a reply.

Update: Hours later, Romero tweeted, "i guess i was shocked and sad to see the id Software of old changed forever today. it's a new day and a new id." Same old Romero, though.

@theromero [Twitter via VG247]

id Software is still a development studio that commands respect, but it's one that had found itself not quite fitting in of late, its principals told us during a phone interview tied to the announcement of the company's sale to ZeniMax.

One of the problems lately, Carmack told Kotaku, is that id just wasn't a good fit with big publishers these days. "As we were shopping Rage and Doom and upcoming stuff, talking about all of that, we were getting a pretty consistent line from all the publishers," he said. "They were willing to continue to fund our working with partner companies for all of these but pretty much ever publisher said, ‘Well, it would be worth much more to us if you would grow your studio and do more of your own work internally. That's why we already started to staff up to do Doom 4 internally. So things were already moving in that direction."

Carmack spoke specifically of Activision, where id's games such as the upcoming Wolfenstein (developed in partnership with Raven), would be published under the same label as works from Activision's internal studios, like Call of Duty and Modern Warfare studios Treyarch and Infinity Ward. "Going back to a much earlier time," Carmack said, "We were just Activision's shooter shop. We did the FPSes there. There was no conflict, and that was great. But they brought on their own internal studios and there's a very real conflict there between whether they want to put resources behind something they own the IP for and derive all the profit for versus something where they don't own the IP and they might feel like any effort they're putting into it isn't going into their value but somebody else's. That problem has grown over the years as budgets have increased."

Hollenshead told Kotaku that he found ZeniMax to have the closest match with id in terms of a philosophy on how to best make and sell games. It was a better fit, he said, than the studio's recent publishing partners Activision and EA.

What comes out of the deal is a stronger id, the men say. "Things aren't really going to be different in terms of what's going on at id," Hollenshead said. "We're not going to change the kinds of games we make…. It allows us to accelerate the growth of our internal studios, so we can focus on making all of our internal games as opposed to working with external partners where there has been a step down in quality… There will be more, better games from id. So if you're a fan of the company, then it is all upside and all things to look forward to."

Carmack's high on id even now, of course. He said the company just did a "first-look" event for upcoming EA-published, id-developed racing-FPS Rage last week and that it "went spectacularly."

Doom 4 will be published by ZeniMax/Bethesda. The Wolfenstein and Rage games being made under Activision and EA's publishing labels, respectively, will continue as such. But any sequels will be ZeniMax games.

And will there be any Bethesda-id crossover coming out of this? "The teams are very much separate," Carmack said. "There is a lot of mutual respect there. There's going to be a lot of communication and cross-pollination. I doubt there's going to be any technology shifts between the two companies, but there's certainly going to be cooperation. And I wouldn't be shocked to see some hints of different things crossing over in different ways. That's just the kind of stuff when you have lots of people who think everybody is working on cool stuff together."

Terms of today's deal were not disclosed. ZeniMax and id are private companies.

Two of the most acclaimed game development studios of all time are joining forces. ZeniMax Media, parent company of Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls development studio Bethesda Softworks, announced today that it is purchasing legendary Doom and Wolfenstein studio id.

In an interview with Kotaku, id co-founder John Carmack, id CEO Todd Hollenshead and ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman said the purchase will change none of the principles or principals of id and Bethesda but will allow id to grow like it never has before. The purchase does not affect plans for previously announced games from id that are slated for release through other publishers, including the Activision-backed Wolfenstein and the EA Partners-planned Rage.

Why did id sell?

"We're really getting kind of tired competing with our own publishers in terms of how our titles will be featured," Carmack said. "And we've really gotten more IPs than we've been able to take advantage of. And working with other companies hasn't been working out as spectacularly as it could. So the idea of actually becoming a publisher and merging Bethesda and ZeniMax on there [is ideal.] It would be hard to imagine a more complementary relationship. They are triple A, top-of-the-line in what they do in the RPGs. And they have no overlap with all the things we do in the FPSes."

Hollenshead said ZeniMax's acquisition will allow id to grow its internal teams, staffing up the groups working on the next Doom — which will now be a ZeniMax game — and the Quake Live team, for starters.

The goal, explained Carmack, is for id to handle all of its own IPs. "We can build the pipeline and have a regular pipeline of releases."

Altman described the deal as a "win for fans of id." He said the deal came about when Hollenshead approached him. ZeniMax had been looking to acquire developers and wanted id, but didn't know it was available until approached. The merger had been in the works for months, according to the men on the call today.

In a press release for today's news, Altman laid out a vision for a robust id: "We, along with many others, consider id Software to be among the finest game studios in the world, with extraordinary design, artistic and technical capabilities. They have demonstrated, repeatedly, that rare ability to create franchise properties that are critical and commercial successes. Our intention is to make sure id Software will continue to do what they do best – make AAA games. Our role will be to provide publisher support through Bethesda Softworks and give id Software the resources it needs to grow and expand."

No co-developed games are planned at this time. But, they joked, getting those Fallout bobbleheads into Rage would be fun.

Next week, id Software will release Doom Resurrection, a new iPhone and iPod Touch game profiled by Venture Beat. According to details on the first-person shooter, expect a "next-generation" level of 3D graphics from previous iPhone games.

id's John Carmack calls Apple's phone platform a "real game platform" and has his own Doom, dubbed Doom Classic, in the works. Doom Resurrection development was handled by Escalation Studios, which, with Carmack's help, got the game up and running at 30 frames-per-second in six months.

Look for it to hit next week, with a Kotaku review to hit soon after.

Next-generation iPhone game Doom Resurrection debuting next week [Venture Beat]

Badass.

He was arrested, and sentenced to a year's detention in a juvenile home. Now, we don't point this out to somehow shame the man. He's an industry great, it's a matter of public record, and it was decades ago.

No, we point it out because...well, we kinda wish there were more developers like that. Not a criminal, necessarily (which Carmack certainly isn't), just...someone with a little colour to their lives. Hear me out.

People are always saying games need more punch. More weight behind them, more diversity, that they need to be more than just guns and cars.

But look at the people who make them. They are almost exclusively men (at least in major creative positions), and almost exclusively clean-cut nerds. I mean, Carmack's case really stands out to me amongst game designers, and it's a fairly minor thing. It's not like he shot a man in the face.

Now look at other mediums. A lot of the world's truly great artists - I'm talking painters, authors, composers, even movie directors - were either messed up, or had messed up things happen to them. Van Gogh had ear trouble. Beethoven was deaf. Caravaggio killed a guy. Woody Allen had...family issues. You get the idea.

Many of them perpetrated, or suffered, terrible acts. But history doesn't judge an artist on their behaviour. They judge them on their works.

Maybe if this industry was more like other mediums, and had more people in creative positions who'd spent a night in a cell, or fled from a war, or faced a lifetime of persecution (not that I'd wish that sort of thing on people just to get a better video game), or were just straight-up crazy (again, Itagaki aside), we'd get that real diversity of content that people always seem to be clamouring for.

Maybe!

That's why it's not too surprising to read that John Carmack, id co-founder, says the company is looking at Wii development alongside its iPhone plans. Carmack tells MTV Multiplayer that he spends "far more time playing Wii with my four year-old boy than I do with any other game console."

That doesn't mean the company's "id Tech 5" racer-shooter Rage will be coming to Wii, however.

"Rage is not a viable option on the Wii because of the technology," Carmack says. "We've been pitched and talked about a project to do a title that would fit well on the Wii, and it's actually related to an iPhone title that we're doing."

That sounds like a change in tune for the developer, who said last Summer that he didn't think id's games would be appearing on the platform.

Carmack says that the developer's port of Wolfenstein 3D will be hitting the iPhone soon. Can we expect a Wii release? Has WiiWare changed John's mind?

John Carmack Talks Possible Wii Development, iPhone, ‘Doom 4,' More [MTV Multiplayer]

John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace is investing in what it calls the "Fishbowl Spaceship" - an orbital bubble designed to let space tourists roll around in freefall like.. well, goldfish. Space goldfish.

Yes, it does look crazy and is probably designed purely to distract from Carmack's real goal of building a portal to hell in the caverns of Mars. Armadillo hopes to have a prototype in orbit by the end of next year, with manned flights in 2010 at a low, low price of $100,000.

Fishbowl Spaceship to give tourists a breathtaking 360-degree view [Dvice.com]