QuakeCon Shows Off Rage, id Tech 5 For iPhone

To most people, QuakeCon is an event that is custom built for showing off the latest and greatest in big gaming software. John Carmack, the genius behind id Software, usually gets up on stage and wows the crowd with his new FPS, but this year, it was a bit different.

In his keynote he whiped out his iPhone 4 and said, "iPhone. Rage. 60 frames per second". Rage, his newest FPS, was only expected to be released on the current generation mega machines, so when his iPhone came out, the crowd let out a pretty hearty cheer. What Carmack showed was only a tech demo, but it had all of the textures, lighting effects, and speed that you would expect a solid FPS to have.

The demonstration was built on the id Tech 5 engine, the same engine used for the XBox 360, the PS3, and the PC, which is so advanced that it can run the game at an acceptable speed on a first gen iPhone.

Carmack says in the speech, after explaining how cool the app looks on the iPad, says that the Tech 5 engine could "kill anything done on a previous generation console, like the Xbox or PlayStation 2.".

He does mention the lack of tactile feedback, but I fully expect John Carmack to fix that too. I'll be waiting, Carmack.

Unfortunately for us, id will not be licensing Tech 5 like they do with the majority of their other tech. In an interview with Eurogamer, id's Software boss Todd Hollenshead said that "It's going to be used within ZeniMax, so we're not going to license it to external parties. It's like, look, this is a competitive advantage and we want to keep it within games we publish - not necessarily exclusively to id or id titles, but if you're going to make a game with id Tech 5 then it needs to be published by Bethesda, which I think is a fair thing."

Here's hoping that there will be a slew of great Bethesda titles for the iPhone in 2011.

[Source: Eurogamer, Kotaku]