When new computing platforms go public, their success is highly influenced by their adoption in the software world. As time goes by, more and more companies join "the club," making it all more popular, but this is a vicious circle - if you are not having a good start, big companies won't come, so you won't become notorious enough to draw attention. Anyway, the iPhone is far from being "just another smartphone," and the creators of the Doom franchise are ready to jump in!
Before moving on, I think it's enough to remind you that Doom is being considered by a lot of people(including myself) to be one of the most important titles in the history of gaming, if not even "the most important game of all time," and it's enough to mention that GameSpy labeled it as the "#1 game of all time" after conducting a poll among over 100 game developers and journalists, back in July 2001. So, would you like to see id Software coming up with some iPhone games? I am sure you do, so here's the story...
According to John Carmack, id Software's mobile division is looking to find the resources available for creating a title iPhone-exclusive, and the fact they didn't have anything ready when the new smartphone from Apple was released is simply something caused by scheduling and lack of resources at that time.
While the hardware of the iPhone is considered to be as powerful as a PS2 or a Xbox, the games released so far aren't that great, and Carmack says "The graphics are a little lower but the RAM is a lot higher. You could easily spend $10 million on an iPhone game, but the market just can't support that yet."
Unfortunately, they won't show up with something big in the first place but, as the market grows, we may see some interesting surprises coming from id Software, even a MMO game for cellphones. Obviously, some time must pass until then - "I want to go step by step -- where we do a multiplayer game, then multiplayer with some persistence, then maybe further," concluded the mastermind behind Doom and Quake.