Apple Thoughts: Carmack to Bring Wolfenstein to iPhones!

"I had been frustrated for over a year with the fact that we didn't have any iPhone development projects going internally at Id. I love my iPhone, and I think the App Store is an extremely important model for the software business. Unfortunately, things have conspired against us being out early on the platform. I was just starting to set up a framework to significantly revise Q3 when I considered the possibility of just going to an earlier codebase to experiment with initially. If we wanted to factor performance out of the equation, we could go all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D, the grandfather of FPS games. It had the basic run and gun play that has been built on for fifteen years, but it originally ran on 286 computers, so it should be pretty trivial to hold a good framerate on the iPhone."

I don't know about you, but this excites me no end. Wolfenstein 3D was the game that got me into first person shooters (as I'm sure it was for many of you, also) and it made me buy a PC in the first place. In fact, when Doom and Quake came out, I also upgraded just so I could play them. I'm totally stoked that John himself has taken on this project (this is no Daiktana thankfully). The one thing I noticed in his post is that he's very serious about playability, not porting, and is rethinking the game in a way that'll work for the iPhone. If you're a fan, this is excellent news. Read the whole post. It's huge, but interesting to see his thought process.