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id Software and Fountainhead create id Mobile
It was announced today that id, the company that invented the graphics-card pushing first-person shooter genre, has made the leap onto smaller screens with a new division simply called id Mobile, created in conjunction with Fountainhead Entertainment. The studio will be focused on games for cell phones, DS and PSP, with a few titles (like a mobile Wolfenstein) already in the works.id and Fountainhead have been headed this way for a while, after Doom RPG and the Orcs and Elves games. As you've probably seen, most mobile games are pretty awful (something even id's John Carmack admitted to in this interview about the new division), but if anyone can turn that around, we have faith that Carmack's the guy. (Especially since the rocket thing didn't pan out.)
Carmack returns to cell games with Orcs & Elves
MTV News has a story on Doom co-creator, and gaming guru, John Carmack's latest FPS megahit Orcs & Elves; only thing is, it's not based on some new super-engine that he hand-coded -- using only one hand, mind you -- while building rocketships with the other. Nope, it's a cell phone game. And it's not even an FPS really, it's "an interpolated first-person action-adventure sort of RPG." Err, right.So why return to cell phone gaming so soon after the unlikely hit of last year's Doom RPG? Sure, Fountainhead, the game design company working on Orcs & Elves for EA (who bought Doom RPG's publisher Jamdat last year) is run by Carmack's Mrs., but there has to be more to get one of PC gaming's biggest power-developers trading in his Ferrari for a Yugo. His vision: "'I do sort of have this grand scheme of, we do Orcs & Elves and we do a sequel and we go into this massively multiplayer Orcs & Elves world.' He sees people connecting across their cell phones, using the phone's built-in speaker and earpiece to communicate through the fantasy world."Some Verizon customers can get the game this Sunday, with additional cell phone platforms available in July.
