Once upon a time, more than a decade ago in fact, id Software was SUPER interested in the iPhone market. Well to be fair, this was mostly due to John Carmack being a huge fan of the iPhone and tinkering around with developing for it, which led to excellent touchscreen-capable ports of Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM. But those ports sold rather well and that led to id creating a couple of mobile-exclusive titles, the on-rails shooter Doom Resurrection which was an original spinoff of their classic series, and RAGE: Mutant Bash TV which was a spinoff of their about to be released console and PC first-person shooter RAGE. Yes, those early years of the iPhone and the App Store were great for id Software and its fans, but when John Carmack left id for Oculus in 2013 it seemed the company’s passion for developing games for mobile left with him. Here’s an OLD video of us playing DOOM when it first arrived on the iPhone way back in 2009.
Sadly this means we never got any more id Software games on mobile, not even ports of their older games, which is a real shame as Carmack at one point had indicated a Quake mobile port was basically finished and ready to go but it never saw the light of day. Worse still is that there was nobody actively maintaining the games that id Software HAD put out on the App Store, and once the 32-bit Appocalypse rolled around, well, that’s all she wrote for those games as they no longer worked on modern devices. My heart weeps just thinking...