Shack: It seems like a lot of you old-school developers are getting a kick out of designing those smoke and mirror tricks on the iPhone. Are the constraints making it more fun to work on this platform?

John Carmack: Well I think that we do have the memory of when game design was a different thing. When it was this much faster turn-around, and you could try things.. a lot of us do have that sense of, while the games we make today are majestic and incredible and really unbelievable--if you showed somebody fifteen years ago what a modern title looked like, they just wouldn't believe you that that was what people were running in their living rooms or their offices.

So I'm not going to go on about the good old days or whatever. Things are spectacular today. But there are certain things that we have lost, as things are these huge productions with tens of millions dollar development budgets, and fifty or a hundred people working on a project. There are certain positive things that you get with a small team working for a short amount of time, on a project where any individual can still move the whole direction of the project.

The glass is half full whatever I'm looking at on there. I try to look at the upside of each platform, but there are certain aspects of working on the iPhone as a project that are positive, rewarding things as a developer that you don't get on the big top-end development.

Shack: What's your take on iPhone DLC? Is that something you're considering for Resurrection?

Tom Mustaine: Yeah, we are absolutely. It won't be in the shipping version, we actually kind of got sideswiped by the 3.0 launch happening so quickly. But we actually have a version of the game that does cooperative multiplayer, so you can actually do peer-to-peer multiplayer, where you see two persons on the screen at the time, and maybe we'll actually have more than that, up to four players.

And it's a blast. You can play through the levels, they scale up, and you can compete for score and play cooperatively. And then also this game really fits well with downloadable content, so we're definitely looking at those with a future 3.0 update.

John Carmack: Yeah, we still really don't even know what the plan is going to be for the 2.0 to 3.0 transition in terms of using new features. We haven't checked into how the App store handles things. Can somebody accidentally download something they don't want in an upgrade? How fast is the market going to migrate over?

And unfortunately Apple is unlikely to give us any statistics of what's going to be a guess about when you want to start doing something 3.0-only on there. I've got the same problem with Doom Classic, where right now it plays on your 2.0 with Wi-fi multiplayer, and eventually we expect to do a 3.0 Bluetooth multiplayer and downloadable content on there. I'm still leaning on doing a 2.0 version first and a 3.0 version later.

Shack: John, it was reported that you were looking to meet with Apple and offer some advice on how to improve gaming on the iPhone. To either of you, after shipping this product, what are some specific things that you would ask Apple to change or improve?

John Carmack: I've got a number of pretty specific stuff, and some of the best news about all of this that's happened recently is that [former Ensemble Studios developer] Graeme Devine, who worked on the Doom 3 project with me at id, as well as Quake III, is now in a significant position at Apple for gaming technology on the iPhone. This has made my life so much better on there, because Graeme doesn't need a translator. I can just talk to him in the most efficient possible way, he knows exactly what I'm saying, and he's just running around making some things happen, finding out why some things are broken.

One of the most obvious, painful things right now is something is really, really sick in the multitouch processing on the iPhone, where you can chew up literally 50% of the CPU by putting both thumbs on the screen and waving them around. Bad stuff happens there, and that's just really unacceptable. The memory management system right now is very, very problematic with the iPhone. The fact that there is no number that if you fit in it, you can be guaranteed that you won't be killed. I think that is long-term unacceptable. Apple will have to put in some at least discreet swapping, if not random paging. I mean, there are directions that I think they will wind up going.

And I don't question what they've done so far--it's hard to argue with the level of success that they've had. And there are a couple of things on the OpenGL extension side that I think they should do. I love working on the platform right now, but there are a few steps they have to take to allow it to live up to its potential as you would see on a DS or a PSP.