Shack: What do you think about the hardware upgrade with the 3GS? Is that something you're concerned about if Apple continues to segment the market down the line?

John Carmack: There are a few aspects to that. One, the worry is--and it's still not clear that this will be a problem, [but] left to their own, OS and software companies, whether it's Apple or Microsoft, they tend to just put more and more features into each release. And for a given hardware platform, it just gets slower and slower with each new OS update. Apple has done this before on previous desktop platforms. Sometimes they get speed boosts, but large-scale, long-term things generally get worse as they pile more things on them.

We are trying very very hard to convince Apple that this not the direction they should be going on the iPhone, because we expect that every time somebody upgrades an iPhone to a 2G to a 3G to a 3GS, the old device becomes an iPod for somebody else, and we think that they stay in play there. And I am much more excited to see Apple have 50 million baseline spec systems out there than the latest and greatest hardware.

Now I am very excited about what I can do from a hardware and graphics standpoint with the 3GS. With vertex fragment shaders and OpenGL 2.0, I'm pretty convinced that I can actually run the MegaTexture id Tech 5 content creation pipeline on there. And I'm not sure what game I want to do that with yet, but the combination of seeing people download 700mb files of Myst on there, and the new capabilities, I could do some mind-blowingly cool stuff on there. But that's going to be a much, much smaller market. So there's no way I could justify doing something like Doom: Resurrection, where we take a significantly experienced dev team and have them work for a significant number of months to develop something. You're not going to target something like that exclusively for a brand new emerged platform there.

But I hope I can wind up doing something in the good old classic way of doing things, where I do something that's just amazingly cool to look at but maybe a little thin on the ground in terms of what the actual substance is there. But do that to kind of get things out and test it and see what's going on. Because our mainstream development is going to be focused on the original baseline platform. The 3GS will always run it faster and smoother, and maybe we can add a few simple things to add on there, but you just can't--especially scaling all the way from fixed functions to programmable shaders--it's just a completely different development strategy if you want to max it out.

There's always that tension between saying, "I know what I could do on this hardware given the time and development budget on here, but can we actually justify doing that?" So far the iPhone baseline stuff--Wolfenstein 3D Classic has sold really well. It completely justified even my relatively inexpensive time that I spent on that, and I think Doom Classic is going to do great. Doom: Resurrection is an experiment for us where it was fairly expensive to develop, it was a high-end development strategy on here, unlike most of the iPhone titles so far. The big titles have been ports, and the small titles are small titles.

So this is somewhat chancy ground on here, but if it does as well as Wolfenstein 3D we'll have come out okay. If it sells equal units at the higher price point on there, we'll have come out great, and we'll put twice the effort into the next from-scratch iPhone project. But we don't know. The biggest worry about the platform in general is that if everybody thinks all games are going to cost $1.99, you're never going to DS or PSP-like original titles coming on the iPhone because it just won't be justified.

Shack: That brings me to my next question, which is what is the price of Doom: Resurrection, and how did you arrive at that point?

John Carmack: It's coming out at $9.99. Doom Classic will probably be $5 or $6, we're not positive on that. And this is, you know.. the App store is great in that we get lots of data. We find out what happens with promotions and sales, and it does turn that market into more of a data- driven science rather than just what people think will work out. But there definitely is that worry, if people think that iPhone games just really have to be cheap. Obviously people pay $20, $30, $40 for a DS, PSP title on there coming out at the high end.

But we're still finding out how things are going on the iPhone. It is great that we've always got the possibility to do sales and promotions and things like that. That is one of the real benefits of the App store.

Shack: Will the ZeniMax acquisition affect id Mobile at all? Specifically, will your deal with ZeniMax limit the amount of time you have to work on mobile projects?

John Carmack: So my interaction--the whole mobile stuff starting with Doom RPG, Wolfenstein RPG--first of all it's really been cool to see the evolution of that. But my interaction on those would be, I would go and spend a few days writing some technology, a few days here updating it, a week writing the new 3D engine for the other stuff. Most of the work was done by Anna and her team at the id Mobile team.

The iPhone stuff, somewhat similarly, I started off doing proof-of-concept stuff there with stuff like Wolfenstein 3D Classic, and doing some various technical direction and various work on Doom: Resurrection. With Wolfenstein 3D, it was interesting, that was really the first thing where I did pretty much go in and do the whole project myself. The same with Doom Classic. And that was actually fun for me, to have that sense of total responsibility there, where it's not just, "Well, I'm doing my part, but there are fifteen other programmers here." I don't expect much of that to change.

I do hope that after Doom Classic, we'll be trying to put some other developers on the future classic titles. I don't think I'm going to personally wind up doing all of the work on Quake, Quake 2, Quake Arena on there, although I may need to go in and make sure specific things are done the way I want them to be. And we have so many things that we're excited about on the iPhone that--I like doing the actual raw programming work like we did on that classic games there, but I'm certainly not going to have the time to be that involved in all of them.

I certainly want to do this MegaTexture demo for the 3GS stuff, I work on that myself. But from a high level strategy sense on there, ZeniMax is behind the iPhone. My counterpart Todd Howard at Bethesda is a huge iPhone fan, and they're excited about doing some things. So I don't think anything likely is going to change. Obviously none of this stuff has been extremely well planned out, as witnessed with Wolfenstein 3D Classic and the "Oh, let's just go make a product out of this!" way that that happened. But I don't think anything's changing.

Tom Mustaine: Yeah, it's definitely turned our head. We're going to stay on the Wii as well--we're Xbox and PS3 developers as well--but right now, from our size, the iPhone is really kind of a sweet spot, and the Wii is kind of a sweet spot. We're still very excited about what we can do on the iPhone. We've been talking on-off with John and the team here about potentially doing other products together, so we'll see what happens. But it's a good place to be right now. Hopefully Resurrection comes out and everybody loves it, and we'll see what we can do next.

Shack: Thanks guys.