You may know John Carmack as the game-maker, the dreamer of dreams of sorts. Carmack is the creative brains behind such computer gaming classics like Quake, and now the mobile development team at id have big plans for iOS. Carmack demoed RAGE on the iPhone at this year's QuakeCon, and now he's speaking out about his plans for the game on all iOS devices.
In his Bethesda blog, Carmack discusses his demo at QuakeCon, and how it might have given mobile gaming fans the wrong idea. "I said something like 'It's RAGE. On the iPhone. At 60 frames a second.' Some people took that to mean that the entire PC/console game experience was going to be on the iPhone, which is definitely not the case."
What Carmack showed at the demo was actually the content creation pipeline and not the full RAGE game on iOS. He adds that while it would be amazing to get a full-blown PC game for an iPhone 4, it would also be a "hopelessly bad idea." Regardless, Carmack admits that the RAGE game is something that has never been seen before on iOS platforms, and its impending release will hopefully be a game changer.
"The data required for the game is big. Really, really big. Seeing Myst do well on the iPhone with a 700 meg download gave me some confidence that users would still download huge apps, and that became the target size for our standard definition version, but the high definition version for iPad / iPhone 4 will be around twice that size. This is more like getting a movie than an app, so be prepared for a long download. Still, for perspective, the full scale RAGE game is around 20 gigs of data with JPEG-XR compression, so 0.7 gigs of non-transcoded data is obviously a tiny slice of it."
Carmack adds that hopefully, the company will be able to offer the game for a $0.99 standard / $1.99 high definition price point. If you're interested in the rest of the article, head over to Carmack's blog post to read a little bit more about the technical details of the game.
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