id Software’s Rage to debut on iPhone this year

John Carmack, the legendary game programmer at id Software, announced at the company’s big fan event, Quakecon, today that his next iPhone game will be Rage.

Based on the company’s upcoming PC and game console title, Rage for the iPhone will debut later this year. The game runs on Carmack’s latest graphics technology, called id Tech 5, and it uses megatextures, which make it easier to create extremely fast and finely detailed game graphics. That means this iPhone game will look particularly sharp compared to more primitive 3-D graphics in most iPhone games. Rage will debut on the PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2011.

Rage for the iPhone will let players control the full movement of their game character in first-person mode. Carmack said in his keynote speech that Rage would look better than previous iPhone games. The news was among the announcements at Quakecon in Dallas. id’s parent company, ZeniMax Media, also said it was acquiring Arkane, a game development studio, for an undisclosed price.

Carmack said that id is considering making Rage for Android phones, but had not concluded anything yet.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.