Carmack: Software holding back iPhone
But he's going to tell Apple what's what.
Id Software's John Carmack has said that the powerful iPhone is being held back by "software inefficiencies", and that he will soon meet with Apple to advise them on ways to improve the system as a games platform.
"If you look at it in raw hardware horsepower, the iPhone should be better in performance than the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable," he told VentureBeat. "But the truth is, you can't exploit it all because of software inefficiencies."
Carmack has previously criticised Apple's attitude to gaming, telling Eurogamer last year that "Steve Jobs doesn't care about games" because "he's not a gamer".
And while it's good news that one of the industry's smartest programmers is going to advise the company on how to improve, it does call to mind Valve boss Gabe Newell's comments in an interview two years ago with Kikizo, when he said the following:
"We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go 'wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming'. And then we'll say, 'OK, here are three things you could do to make that better', and then they say OK, and then we never see them again.
"And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything."
Given the success of games on the iTunes App Store, perhaps things have changed. Speaking of which, id's Doom game for iPhone, apparently now called Doom Resurrection, is due out next week according to VentureBeat. (Update: Apologies - Resurrection is a separate game derived from Doom III.)