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The man who brought us Doom has showcased a demo of his upcoming game, Rage, which works on the iPhone 4 at a mind-bending speed of 60 frames per second.
John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and lead programmer of classics such as Quake and Wolfenstein 3D, showed off footage of the first-person shooter at Quake Con 2010 in the US. The demo looks stunning and showcases the exciting potential of the iPhone 4 in the world of gaming.
An iPad and iPhone version of the game has been in the works for a while, and follows on from previous releases of id Software on Apple’s App Store. “I figured out most technically how I wanted to do this a little over a year ago when we were talking about doing something on the Wii,” says Carmack. “It works really very smoothly, and what we have is all the megatextured goodness we are used to.”
Carmack also said the game ran well on an original iPhone 2G. “Compared to our other titles on here, this will be running at a similar or better frame rate to the original Doom Classic, significantly better than Doom Resurrection.”
Carmack was particularly enthused about the ‘feel’ of dragging yourself around using touch on the iPad. But he did say it was just a demo, and they were still working on putting it into a game framework.
Back in March, the software programmer revealed there were two people at id Software dedicated to iPhone development, and planned to release an iPhone Rage game in time with the release of it on other platforms.
Sony Ericsson has been getting serious about the smart phone gaming market lately, with the announcement of a PlayStation phone. Apple will hope Rage is just the beginning of developers taking advantage of the increased power of the iPhone 4.
So far, App Store games have had a tendency to be retro or graphically limited, while previous iPhone hardware didn’t seem up to supporting games of the graphical standard hardcore gamers are used to. By the look of the demo, Rage could change all that.
“As you look towards the industry in future years, there’s the idea that you could pull the machine out of your pocket that could kill anything on a previous generation console, like an Xbox or PlayStation 2, on the hardware,” muses Carmack.
“It’s not as powerful as the current generation, but it’s not all that far off.”
Image credit: ragegame.net
