John Carmack, prolific game programmer and the technical director of id Software, demoed the upcoming game Rage on an iPhone 4 during his keynote speech at the QuakeCon 2010 conference this week. Carmack said that he had created the demo, which ran at an impressive 60 frames per second, to make people go "oh my god, look at this." The ultimately released iPhone version of the game will run at a more modest framerate, and a "show-off" edition will be on the App Store this year ahead of the planned 2011 release of the title on consoles and PCs.
Carmack had praise for the iPhone's promise as a gaming platform, saying it was able to "kill anything done on a previous generation console - like an Xbox or PS2 - with the hardware that's there." Despite lacking tactile feedback and other features of cutting edge consoles, Carmack said, the iPhone was an example of the future direction the gaming industry was going in. "It's not as powerful as current generation consoles, but it's not that far off," he said. The iPhone game will use id Software's proprietary megatexure technology, but Carmack indicated that the frame rate in the final game would be lower than the 60 fps shown in the demo, which he said took him about two weeks to create. The framerate of the actual game, according to Carmack, will be close to the framerate of Doom Classic, but better than Doom Resurrection.
Rage is id's first new major game series in the almost fifteen years since Quake came out. Carmack had said in an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine ahead of QuakeCon that id Software was unlikely to create any new franchises for many years to come. "We do already have more IPs (intellectual properties) than we can exploit," he said. "I doubt we're going to do another IP. It's scary to say it, but maybe not in the next decade even, because we want to support Wolfenstein, Doom Quake - and hopefully we can add Rage onto that - and I don't want five teams here. Three is scary enough."