The game is expected to be finished up and submitted to the iTunes App Store in the next month, id technical director John Carmack explained in a progress report.

"Wolfenstein 3D Classic was a quickie project to satisfy my curiosity and test the iPhone waters, but Doom is a more serious effort," he explained." In addition to the millions of people with fond memories of the game, there is still an active gaming / development community surrounding the original Doom, and I don't want to disappoint any of them."

The iPhone release will sport WiFi multiplayer, with Bluetooth support coming in the future, but won't feature 3G multiplayer as "the latencies just aren't good enough."

"With the speed (a solid 30 fps, even in the more aggressive later levels), the audio, the resolution, and the rendering quality, it is Doom as you remember it, which is quite a bit better than it actually was," Carmack wrote, noting his fear of adding any new features.

He clarified: "While I can certainly add a bunch of new features fairly quickly, iterating through a lot of user testing and checking for problems across the >100 commercial Doom levels would take a lot longer...and there would be some degree of negative backlash to almost any 'improvements' I made."

"It would be fun to take a small team, permanently fork it, and make a 'Doom++' just for the iPhone, but that wouldn't be the best first move. Maybe later."

id's technical guru also touched on the subject of file size, revealing that Doom will weigh in at more than 10MB, meaning that it won't be downloadable over 3G and will instead require users to buy it from a WiFi connection or iTunes-equipped computer.

"Maybe being able to get an app over 3G really isn't very important to its success," he speculated. "The fact that people are downloading Myst on the iPhone is heartening -- I have ideas for leveraging our high end idTech-5 content creation pipeline for a future iPhone game, if people will go for a few hundred meg download."