"It was a hold over from the Brew and Java development of the game," Hollenshead said. "Wolfenstein has been fighting censorship since 1992 when Nintendo made us change the blood to green and the dogs to rats.

"Some day people may realize this is a game and it's supposed to be fun and we're making fun of these things, not endorsing them."

id decided to take out references to Nazis because of concerns raised by cell phone carriers for the earlier version of the game. When it came time to move the title over to the iPhone it got a new look, but Hitler remained mustache free.

"We wanted to be consistent with the versions," said Hollenshead, who also happens to sport a soulpatch.

The issues id faced with mobile phone development will soon be coming to an end, Hollenshead added.

"Doom 2 RPG may be our last Brew and Java game we develop in-house," he said. "We're are shifting our mobile development toward the iPhone."

That means iPhone and iPod Touch gamers can expect the developer to start looking more at some of the new tech coming out for the platform including multiplayer gaming and "other ways" to build the community around a game.

Hollenshead said he would be making some iPhone announcements later today during the QuakeCon 2009 press conference. Make sure to check back on Kotaku for our live coverage of the event.

Unwilling, it seems, to keep Hitler in the turn-based title, the developers decided the next best thing would be to create a leader who has lower facial hair than the infamous Nazi. The swastikas too have been replaced with a plus sign.

It's an interesting decision to include the iconic look and setting of the game but to essentially edit out the Nazi references. I wonder if future console and PC shooters from Electronic Arts will get the same sort of treatment.

Are there other regimes that won't be appearing in video games in the future?

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.

But when I arrived at the EA Mobile hands-on session, the only game they had to show me was Scrabble. Which came out like a year ago. What gives?

Well — to EA Mobile, what's important here is "delivering on the promise of mobile." To do that, says VP Travis Boatman, a company has to have a great device to work with with a great operating system and a great merchandising-distribution platform.

"We've always believed in mobile," said Boatman. "We're in this for the long haul. And it's not going to stop here."

So when we got Scrabble on both Facebook and iPhone last year, that wasn't the end of it for EA Mobile. With the release of the Apple 3.0 firmware for the iPhone, they've connected the two versions so you can play against up to four people cross-platform (well, cross iPhone/PC).

I have to admit, this is pretty slick. You can see the moves your PC-bound buddy makes without refreshing the screen on your iPhone and you can even carry on a chat in the chat box.

But as nifty as it is, it's still not Wolfenstein RPG.

Look for the update to your Scrabble app sometime tomorrow or — if there's some SNAFU on the Apple side — sometime over the next few days.

"John is pretty disappointed we didn’t have the manpower and resources to have a game for the launch of the" app store, id CEO Todd Hollenshead said.

Hollenshead said that Carmack and other id folks had been playing around with the iPhone SDK for awhile, but that the developer's small in-house mobile team just didn't have the time to put together a game in time.

"It appears that at this point that given the size of our team, we can only work on one mobile game at a time. We are probably partner up and the first (iPhone game) will be one where we work with a publishing partner."

Already the team is working on both Wolfenstein RPG and Doom 2 RPG for mobile phones, both of which id Software would like to bring to the iPhone, Hollenshead said.

"We have ambitions to have both on the iPhone," he said, "but it's too early to say if that's going to happen at this point."

As much as id seems to like the idea of iPhone gaming, they're taking a caution approach, but not for the reasons you'd think.

"The iPhone is cool, and the n-Gage was a nerd device," Hollenshead said. "The iphone is a pretty damn awesome phone, it’s a great business device, it's one of the best portable mp3 player you can buy, it can play videos. There's a lot of reasons to have that device and it has the power to play games as well. It’s a cool device that you can play games on and they can be awesome games."

But, perhaps the iPhone is too good at all the things it does.

Games on the iPhone, Hollenshead explains, are "going to be competing with all of those other things you can do on the iPhone that are pretty cool, that’s the challenge."

"It does raise the bar on what you need to do from a game standpoint."

See, Carmack's initial attraction to mobile gaming was the fact that, well, most cell phone games are crap and most cell phones can't do more than a few things well.

"Doom RPG was a fun game you could play on your cell phone," he said. "With the iPhone the experience, what you are going to be doing in games, has to rise because there are so many other things you can do with it."