Following the release of Doom 3, legendary developer id Software shuffled to the background of the gaming industry for a time. Now the company is readying for a resurgence, on several fronts at once.

id is readying two traditional big-budget titles in Doom 4 and Rage, the latter marking the company's first original IP in some time. Founded late last year, id Mobile will be releasing its first project later this year with Wolfenstein RPG, the follow-up to the Doom RPG. Finally, the company is forging new ground in the web-based gaming sector with Quake Live, a free version of Quake III Arena without all the fuss--or the cost.

Recently I had a chance to talk with id Software co-founder John Carmack, as well as executive producer Marty Stratton. While the theme of the talk was Quake Live, we also covered topics ranging from the state of PC gaming to the potential of iPhone development.

Shack: I had a chance to check out the Quake Live beta last night, and more than the technology or the price point, the thing that impressed me the most was how easy it was to get started and jump into a game. I assume that was a primary goal in development?

John Carmack: Yes, and I'm so happy we're finally talking to somebody that's actually been on the beta and gone and looked at it so I don't have to explain everything from first principle.

But yeah, the idea is that we know that we had a good core gameplay experience there, but, for instance, if somebody was given a copy of Quake Arena right now and they wanted to go play the game and navigate online, they would have a wretched experience. Because we have people that have been playing the game for nine years online, and somebody who just gets the game for the first time and says, "Oh I'm gonna jump on here," there's no way they would have a decent experience.

But so much of what we're trying to do here is to make that possible. To have somebody who is not necessarily a first person shooter player, and would not go and spend 50 or 60 bucks on a brand new AAA title, or might not even own a console or something, but can just, from practically any computer in the country--if not the world--sit down, go to Quake Live, get the things on there, jump in, be led through a new style of play, and have everything catered around what they're capable of doing and what's going to be enjoyable for them.

So that's the hope. We're hoping that we get something that you could basically tell anybody, "Hey, go check this out, you might enjoy it." And if they're willing to spend 20 minutes to go through and play through the basic match, and get a look at it, that they might say, "Hey, I do kind of like this style of game."

Shack: Do you see the future of PC game development becoming focused on that challenge of streamlining the user experience?

John Carmack: Yeah, I think that the PC definitely can't.. we can't go on making PC games like we used to. The combination of the dominance of the consoles, as far as market forces there, and piracy.. the traditional AAA, media-heavy boxed game that sells for a bunch of money, and goes out on the PC for a single player experience--it's just not happening. Even if we look at something that had such a push like Crysis, it didn't really do all that well.

While at id Software we're still certainly doing those types of AAA titles on [the PC platform], we have to look at it from a cross-platform product perspective on there, rather than being PC-focused like we used to be. I mean, all the way up to our last major title, which was Doom 3, we were a PC company. We made PC games, and we gave some thought to how they might be deployed on consoles, but that wasn't what we were fundamentally doing. And that has changed with this generation.

But still, there are some things that the PC does fundamentally better than the console. I mean, the internet interaction, as far as displaying and navigating large amounts of information on a website--while you have web browsers on consoles, they suck, you know, they're just not good. It's not like what you've got on the PC.

And from a first person shooter perspective, the keyboard/mouse interface is still just a lot better than a console interface. It's a much more direct position vs. integrating over time.. it's just plain better, and that's one of the things we want to cater to.

So there are strengths that the PC has, and we think Quake Live is very much playing to them. While given infinite resources, yeah, it'd be great to go ahead and do another technology showcase on the PC, because you've got a couple times the power in a modern high-end system than you do in a current generation console.

But it's just not feasible for us as a company to continue taking that route. So we are branching out into some different areas and diversifying a little bit, where we've got our id Tech 5, cross-platform, high-end stuff that we are pushing, and we've also got Quake Live and our mobile products.

Shack: Speaking of mobile products, the second generation iPhone launched today. What's going on at id Mobile?

John Carmack: I'm really kind of sad about.. how things played out outside of our real control on that. I'm really bullish on the iPhone market. I think that what they're doing with iTunes, cutting the carriers out of there.. it's a great hardware platform.

It's a market I really want to be in, we just didn't have the resources to go do something for the initial launch.

Robert Duffy and I actually hacked together a kind of a port of some of the Orcs & Elves stuff using the 3D engine, but we just didn't have the manpower to do something that would be what we would consider our best foot forward. We still have a lot of effort going on in the Java and BREW stuff. Wolfenstein RPG is gonna be coming out later this year, and that's really great in a lot of ways.