Id won't do it, so hobbyists ported Carmack's final Doom game to PC
pcgamer.comDoom RPG is one of those odd side-stories in videogame history, a project born from id Software co-founder John Carmack's relentlessly tinkering nature. It was a mobile game from the pre-smartphone era, and the game's origins are as simple as Carmack's wife buying him a slightly better phone: which naturally set our boy to thinking.
«Getting into this was really a sort of random event,» Carmack told Eurogamer in 2006. «A year ago, I rarely carried a cell phone, and it was just an old black-and-white clunker. When my wife gave me a new mid-range phone with a decent colour display and some bad game demos on it, I had my curiosity piqued a little about the platform. It turned out to be really easy to develop Java applications for the phone, so I played around a little bit and started thinking about what elements would make a good game for the platform.»
Those elements were obviously Doom, but turn-based and with more focus on RPG elements (for example, talking to scientists and accessing terminals is a big part of the game). Carmack essentially built the bare bones of what would become Doom RPG himself: «I wrote a proof-of-concept demo of the basic rendering and play style, and then turned it over to Fountainhead Entertainment to develop into a full game.»
The game was released in September 2005 on phones that supported BREW, Java ME, or J2ME. It was a decent success and garnered several 'mobile game of the year' awards, because it was fundamentally a decent game: indeed, Carmack and Fountainhead were pleased enough that they'd go on to build a separate RPG series on this foundation, Orcs & Elves, as well as Wolfenstein RPG and Doom II RPG.
As is the case with many early mobile titles, Doom RPG was essentially locked to
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