“My relationship with Apple has been long standing, but it’s a rollercoaster ride,” he told Kotaku. “I’ll be invited up on stage for a keynote one month and then I’ll say something they don’t like and I can be blacklisted for six months.”

Working with Apple on iPhone games has been no different, Carmack said, but he is happy to see that former collaborator Graeme Devine is now working at Apple in the iPhone Game Technologies division.

Devine worked at id Software from 1999 to 2003, producing and programming on a number of games including Quake III, Doom 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Devine went on to Ensemble Studios where he worked on Age of Empires 3 and Halo Wars before that studio was shut down.

Earlier this year he moved to Apple.

“Graeme Devine is in a significant position as a game developer at Apple,” Carmack said. “I have a real man on the inside now. We knew each other from way back in the day.

“He’s a real developer and I understand everything he is saying.”

Devine’s role at Apple doesn’t mean that Carmack’s dealings with the company has gotten any less bumpy though. Doom Classic was rejected twice before Apple allowed it to appear in the store with some minor changes.

Carmack thinks the run-ins with Apple are because the company, the highest people in the company, look down on games. But the popularity of gaming on the iPhone has forced Apple to try and come to grips with that, even if they’re not happy about it.

“At the highest level of Apple, in their heart of hearts,” Carmack said, “they’re not proud of the iPhone being a game machine, they wish it was something else.”

“It’s not cast in stone yet, but at this point no, we don’t think we will have dedicated servers,” he said, according to Variety. But he’s glad “we won’t have to be a pioneer on that. We’ll see how it works out for everyone else.”

News that Infinity Ward was dropping dedicated server support in favour of everyone playing online through its new matchmaking service IWNet touched, off, predictably, a petition-fuelled backlash from a PC community that had long used dedicated servers to play Call of Duty games. Carmack, Variety said, indicated the felt the servers are a relic of PC gaming’s early days.

Dedicated Servers and Rage – News You Probably Don’t Want to Hear [Variety]

“Wolfenstein Classic was my original experiment on whether a first-person shooter would be any fun on the iPhone,” he said. “It did surprisingly well for all of us.”

So well, in fact, that Carmack finds himself spending a disproportionate amount of his time working on future iPhone games. Already id Software has released Wolfenstein Classic, Quake RPG, Doom Resurrection and this week Doom Classic.

Carmack said that there was a lot of “hand wringing” initially over the idea of spending the company’s own money (there was no publisher to help fund development) on making games for the iPhone. Doom Resurrection when it hit was probably the most expensive game to develop for the iPhone, Carmack says.

But that internal concern quickly disappeared when Wolfenstein Classic hit the App Store.

“It did really well for us,” he said. “It was Wolfenstein Classic that made the argument for iPhone development for me. We made quite a bit of money off of that.”

After its success Carmack and id Software decided to launch a three-prong approach to iPhone development, working on classic remakes, role-playing titles and original games.

With only a few games out for the platform so far, each game gives Carmack a chance to experiment with development and the technology, he said.

While Doom Classic’s touch controls may seem very similar to those found in Wolfenstein Classic, Carmack says there’s quite a big difference.

” There were some important changes, like the virtual stick autocentering, changes to precise ramping of movement,” he said.

The game also introduces a new control option that allows gamers to turn around in the game by spinning a virtual wheel. But only six months into iPhone game development, Carmack says he already finds himself “hamstrung” by people’s expectations of controls set by his previous games.

“We’re still feeling out what will play well and what people will like,” he said.

Next up for Carmack is Quake Classic, it will be the first shooter that id Software releases for the iPhone that will include the ability to look up and down, not just side to side.

I pointed out that some in the gaming and development community have suggested that both Doom and Wolfenstein Classic control so well because they don’t need to worry about up and down controls.

Carmack said that while adding another axis of control is tricky, it would be wrong to dismiss what the current games have accomplished.

“There is an excellent experiment that can be done here,” he said. “Play the jail broken Doom and the one I worked on. There is obviously a large difference here. You can be dismissive of the game, that there is a limited control input set, but there is a lot of work that goes into that.

“Everything that has a 32-bit processor has had Doom ported to it, you can run it on a toaster, but it takes a lot of work and care to turn it into something you would choose to play. I had people showing me FPS apps while I was working on Wolfenstein, and they were all atrocious.”

Carmack says that it is possible that a fully controlled first-person shooter just isn’t in the cards for the iPhone, but he won’t really know until he’s developed Quake Classic. After that, he plans to work on Quake 2 for the iPhone.

“I’m not sure if after Quake 2 I want to do Quake Arena or Quake Live for the iPhone,” he said.

The problem is that while Quake Live has better levels it would require Wi-Fi to play online. That’s because 3G just won’t cut it for Carmack.

“I was originally excited about 3G,” he said. “I was told it could have 180 pings, but when I tested it, it was twice that. It was not usable.”

While the Classics’ line seems fairly mapped out, Carmack isn’t as sure about the RPG and original games coming from the developer. He says that the next RPG game will be Doom 2 RPG and if that does well they will move on to the Orcs and Elves RPG games.

The only other original game announced by id Software is one that will be based on their upcoming PC title Rage, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others in the works. In particular Carmack is interesting in getting parent company Bethesda interested in bringing some of their games over to the iPhone.

“I spent a bit of time talking to Todd Howard about the iPhone,” he said. “We want to make something happen for those products as well.”

An obvious choice would be Fallout, something that Carmack says has already had internal proof of concepts made. But nothing has yet officially happened with the game.

Carmack says that Howard, a big fan of the iPhone, is very supportive of the idea and that anything made based on Bethesda’s games would likely be created as a joint project between id and Bethesda.

He added that he would be involved in making the game most likely, but that his time is “overloaded badly right now”.

“At the very least I’m going to be providing code,” he said.

While more people are being brought on to help with iPhone development at id Software, it’s clear that Carmack wants to stay involved with the growing business.

“I’ve had tons of fun working on it as a platform,”he said. “I carry an iPhone around with me as my regular phone all of the time. It’s like carrying around a dev kit in my pocket.”

The $9 game designed by John Carmack features customisable control schemes, 36 levels spread across four episodes, a bounty of weapons and multiplayer support.

Here’s the full break-down of game features:
Play the legendary first person shooter, DOOM, with an iPhone or iPod Touch
Fight through 36 missions in four action-packed episodes: Knee-Deep in the Dead, Shores of Hell, Inferno and Thy Flesh Consumed
Experience DOOM multiplayer on your mobile device, including Deathmatch and Cooperative play for up to four players via wireless internet
Choose from three different control types and customise the interface to suit your style
Explore the depths of Mars while utilizing the top down map to help your journey and save your game on the fly
Listen to the original soundtrack or disable it and use your own iPod music

Armadillo’s Scorpius craft is the first in a field of entrants to successfully complete the requirements laid out by NASA, which involved ascending 164 feet, flying to a spot 164 feet away, landing, taking off then flying back to where it started. If neither of the two competing craft can satisfy the requirements by October 31, Armadillo will scoop the prize by default, which stands at a cool $US1 million.

And after the cash? Next stop, space.

“Since the Lunar Lander Challenge is quite demanding in terms of performance, with a few tweaks our Scorpius vehicle actually has the capability to travel all the way to space,” says Carmack.

“We’ll be moving quickly to do higher-altitude tests, and we can go up to about 6000 feet here at our home base in Texas before we’ll have to head to New Mexico where we can really push the envelope. We already have scientific payloads from universities lined up to fly as well, so this will be an exciting next few months for commercial spaceflight.”

John Carmack’s Armadillo Finally Wins Lunar Landing Challenge [Gizmodo]

Carmack, ever the programmer, didn’t immediately tell me what his sunset would be. Instead, after I described Kojima’s desire, the legendary Doom programmer responded as follows:

“You could totally do a good job of that today,” he said. “You could do all the post-processing effects and the colour biasing, and you could run through all of that and it would be a bunch of work. But, if somebody said: ‘Go give me a glorious, evocative sunset,’ I might say, ‘Nah, we’ve got more important things to be working on.’ But we could totally do it.”

My conversation with Kojima had taken place in April of 2006 in his Tokyo work apartment, a couple of blocks from Kojima Productions’ offices. He was still making Metal Gear Solid IV then and recalled, through a translator, the limitations of early game consoles. The more primitive machines had challenged him to achieve his goals.

“How can we give users a feeling of walking [by a] beautiful sunset with 16 colours?” Kojima remembered wondering. “That was what we were trying to aim for as designers at that time…a couple of years from now, maybe games will have an implementation of scent or touch or feeling. And then I’ll want to probably implement that in to meet my final goal. So I think this will be a never-ending story. And, well, I think that’s OK, because that’s what creation is all about.”

Ever since that interview, I wondered if other video game creators had their own sunsets, their own goals that they hoped their talent and the world’s technology would enable them to attain.

During our conversation in Texas a couple of Thursdays ago, I asked Carmack a second time if he did have a sunset. “I really don’t think there’s something I look at in my mind and say: ‘This is what we’re striving for,’” he said. “There is lots of stuff that I know are not done particularly well, with different levels of ambient occlusion and distributed light sources … I went through a phase of this at the beginning of [id's next big game,] Rage — the graphics geeky stuff of “‘Oh, I’m doing shaped highlights.” Or, you know, I’m doing parallax mapping. I’m doing this or that.’”

Carmack’s lighting experiments didn’t motivate him to do more, he explained. But I was worried Carmack was still taking my question too literally. I feared he thought I only wanted to know about actual sunsets rather than metaphorical ones. But he wasn’t just talking about sunsets after all, as he proved to me right before we wrapped up our conversation about this stuff.

“I did some demos [of those lighting technologies in Rage] and it’s just not that big of a deal,” he said. “Maybe if you put them together, lump them all together, you get something that comes out and makes you say: ‘This is a big step above.’ But there’s not many little things that matter that much any more in terms of a game. If you’re trying to do a simulation, there’s tons of stuff that you can continue to do better … in terms of what’s going to matter to a person playing a game, there’s not massive stuff to be done. We’re going to continue going; we’re going to continue making it. But it’s past the v of the curve. The more important stuff is making sure that it’s going to be easier and faster to do better stuff like this.”

If John Carmack has a Kojima sunset in his mind, it’s one that involves speedier processes for creating video games. But there’s no thing, no object, no emotion the veteran game creator seems burning to create.

I left the interview wondering: What are the sunsets for the rest of the industry’s video game creators?

[Amazing sunset pic]

“There is a lot of good to be said about Epic and Valve and the tacks that they’ve taken,” Carmack told me during an interview in Dallas last week during QuakeCon. “They’ve both grown to be much bigger companies than id Software was. And, you know, somebody could look at this and say I held id back, because I did not want to grow the company into a really big company at those times. And maybe we would have been better off to do that, but we came off pretty good, so I’m not going to kick myself over any of that.”

Earlier this decade, id Tech 3, the graphics technology used in Quake III Arena, was widely licensed in the industry, used in games like EA’s James Bond Everything or Nothing and the first Call of Duty. At the time, Carmack told me, id didn’t have the support team to handle a wide number of licensees. “Our technology licence stuff was, ‘Ok you pay this and you can have eight hours of technical support,” Carmack recalled. “You can come down and talk to me for eight hours. Mostly it’s, you’re on your own, because we didn’t have support staff.”

To do that better and for more game companies, id would have to grow. Carmack didn’t want that. “We knew that we didn’t want to have the big support staff like they have for things. And I didn’t want to give away the kind of freedom. When you have 50 licensees on stuff like that, you are handcuffed.”

Carmack couldn’t tolerate having to accommodate the need to minimise his own programming efforts in order to not shift code too much and unsettle the other companies relying on the same tech. “The work I’m doing now on id Tech Five is changing some fundamental class hierarchy stuff across all of our resources, and it’s the right thing to do. It’s better, because of that. It’s incredibly painful just doing it in our code base. There’s no way I would contemplate doing that if I had 50 other development teams that would have to go through and make similar changes on there.”

Money left on the table? Perhaps, Carmack said. “It’s a good business on there. We did great on the Quake III generation, tons and tons of licenses on that. But it does tie up your arms a little bit technically and it does mean you’re out of the game business and you’re in the technology supplier business. There are aspects to that that are admirable. There’s definitely a part of me that, as an engineer, says it would be great to try and document this really well, try and clean it up and make it as good as you possibly can, because there’s always this balance between making something really good code and rapidly exploring as many things as you can on there.”

Let the Epics and Valves sweat that stuff, he is happy to conclude. Let them worry about making sure Unreal Engine 3, Source or whatever else works for all the companies that pay to use it.

“I don’t gainsay anybody their success,” he said. “I’m happy to see everybody doing good work on there. I think it’s great to see Epic and Valve doing their thing. I like the industry. I like seeing the industry being vibrant and competitive. “

Carmack made those comments on Thursday, during the id co-founder’s QuakeCon 2009 keynote speech in Dallas (the event that spawned the Longest Liveblog In Kotaku History).

Early in his address, he admitted that Quake Live, the multiplayer in-browser web remake of Quake III Arena that went into open beta early this year, was not up to id’s standard yet. Leaderboards and more community functionality around the game need to be improved, he said. Later, he fielded a question from the audience about the future of the game.

Carmack said he did not think the game could survive on internet advertising alone; the only revenue generator currently in place. Instead, he believes it will be necessary for the financial wellbeing of the project to offer a premium version of the game, which might allow players to host games on their own servers. Web ads won’t suffice.

The Quake Live project is grander than Carmack said he had envisioned, which may be as much a factor in spurring this need for player payment as a weak online ad market. But the game, at its base, will remain free, he noted.

Carmack said the “beta” tag will be removed from the game soon, as problems with leaderboards and other technical issues are resolved. Mac and Linux versions are planned to go live this coming week.

Early in his talk, Carmack said that the next year would prove whether Quake Live is a success. Later, when answering that audience question, he said the game wouldn’t be able to be deemed a failure for two years. He hopes such a pronouncement won’t be necessary, of course.

He said the game has been popular, with half of those who register for it returning to play it at least once a month.

This experiment will continue with some tinkering that users may need to pay for.

The first is the classics line which includes Wolfenstein 3D, which will be getting the ability to download user created levels in a future update. Next for that line will be Doom 3D, which John Carmack said will support local wifi multiplayer. Carmack said during today’s Quakecon press conference, that future classics coming to the iPhone will include Quake II, Quake Arena and even, potentially, Doom 3.

The second line of titles are role-playing games like Wolfenstein RPG, which just hit the iPhone.

The third line of games headed for the iPhone are titles designed from the ground up for the Apple device. That includes, Carmack, a Rage-themed game, perhaps a racer. Carmack said that he believes that Rage game engine Id Tech 5 can run on the iPhone 3Gs

“Potentially that’s eight iPhone titles,” Carmack said. “I would expect an iPhone title from id every other month and that’s going to be neat.”

He thinks that Sony could release a new console before Microsoft. Here’s his rationale: “The whole jockeying for who’s going to release the first next gen console is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of things,” he says. “Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely. As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We’d like to see it be quite a few more years before the next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later.”

Sony has repeatedly stated that the PS3’s lifespan is ten years. The console came out in 2006 in Japan, which means that Sony is not expected to release a new console until 2016 or 2017. With the buzz around Project Natal, Microsoft has recently been talking about a longer shelf life for the Xbox 360.

But, all of this is still unconfirmed and merely speculation on Carmack’s part. In the rest of the link below, Carmack offers his opinion about more futurey stuff as well.

Carmack talks next gen consoles… and beyond [Digital Foundry via GamesIndustry]