The mystery project that John Carmack has hinted at over the last few months is expected to hit the iPhone app store later this month: Doom Resurrection, a 3-D re-imagining of the original Doom.

In fact, the monsters in the new iPhone game (no price set) may look a bit familiar to Doom 3, which refashioned the Doom story on PCs and the Xbox in 2004 and 2005.

"We have actually been able to re-purpose a lot of the Doom 3 media," says John Carmack, technical director and co-founder of id Software. "That has sort of been our contribution to all this, taking all of what was a $10-to-$15 million game development not too long ago and be able to (bring the) art assets, all the textures, the models and the audio and bring it onto the iPhone with really fairly minimal conversion."

Carmack and the co-developers at Dallas-based Escalation Studios reserved the right to "can" the new game if its twists on the first-person shooter for iPhones did not work out to their satisfaction.

"It almost didn’t. Our original design on how you would be tapping on the monsters to shoot at them turned out to be not much fun. We were close to pulling the plug on it," Carmack says. "At that point, Escalation did a new interface for aiming the gun. Instead of tapping on the screen where you wanted to shoot, you tilt around like you are kind of moving ... the reticule around to shoot at the monsters. It's interesting how just a change like that makes all the difference in the world and that it actually turns it into a fun game."

Escalation managing director Tom Mustaine added that "obviously, we wanted this to look really good and that was achieved early on. We wanted to capture that visceral feel that you get from a traditional Doom experience. We modified the shooting mechanic to be something that no one else has done on the platform yet. We are treading a path for people, I think, on the platform to build other games that have this kind of control dynamic."

Players use "a contextually aware on-screen display button," he says, that pop up, for instance, "when a fireball is coming at you, it flashes a 'Dodge' mechanic and you tap 'Dodge' and with the right timing it will move you out of the way. So it still feels like you are getting that moment-to-moment experience. And when guys come and shoot machine guns at you and you have to dodge behind a box and take cover, you tap on 'Cover' and you move in and out of cover. So we have got really a distilled experience of a full-on, PC-console gaming experience put onto the iPhone."

Also due to be released soon is Wolfenstein RPG for EA Mobile and Doom Classic, perhaps next month. "There may be some confusion with Doom Resurrection, which is brand-new, modern-crafted experience stuff and Doom Classic, which is all the old Doom stuff running in this great new environment (the iPhone and iPod Touch)," Carmack says. "I do worry about some confusion, but well, that’s just the way things work out."

By Mike Snider

Image courtesy of id Software