Lead programmer of Doom and co-founder of developer id Software, John Carmack, seems to be a rather straight shooter when it comes to his opinion on gaming.
During last week’s QuakeCon, Carmack shed his thoughts on Apple’s drive in the industry. He stated that :
“The truth is Steve Jobs doesn’t care about games. This is going to be one of those things that I say something in an interview and it gets fed back to him and I’m on his $***head list for a while on that, until he needs me to do something else there. But I think that that’s my general opinion. He’s not a gamer.”
Despite Jobs’ introduction of the App store, that has opened the floodgates for software developers, and already features hundreds of games, Carmack still insists that Apple doesn’t “deeply get” gaming.
He added, in an interview with EuroGamer that:
“It’s difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don’t really believe in. I mean obviously he believes in the music and the iTunes and that whole side of things, and the media side of things, and he gets it and he pushes it and they do wonderful things with that, but he’s not a gamer. That’s just the bottom line about it.”
While Carmack maintains his pessimistic outlook on Steve Jobs’ support for gaming, it doesn’t mean that he negates their products. “I think the iPhone is a potentially extremely important platform for a lot of reasons,” said Carmack in putting Apple’s product up against handhelds such as the PSP. I think it’s a great platform for content and new talent on there,” he said. id Software is currently developing two games for Apple’s device.
