Last week during the QuakeCon keynote address, John Carmack pulled an iPhone 4 out of his pocket and shocked the audience by showing a demo of id Softwares next game, Rage, running on the device. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Rage will have elements of racing games and first person shooters. Theres also said to be RPG elements in the game as well, making it sound similar to both the Fallout series and Borderlands. Information is still limited as the game isnt slated to launch until 2011, but either way the following demonstration is beyond impressive:

Weve spoken at length with John Carmack at length in the past, where hes mentioned potential upcoming id Software titles such as Doom 2, Quake Classic, and the rest of the id back catalog coming to the App Store. Wondering what the state of all these projects were, we once again pow wowed with Carmack to see what hes been up to since we last spoke.

According to John, id has restructured a lot last year and several people from the mobile team has since been sucked in to other big projects, and theyve only recently got the mobile team staffed back up to the proper size for iPhone development. Carmack admits that after releasing Doom Classic [$6.99] he hadnt even opened up Xcode until last month to start working on Rage technology.

Currently, id is completely focused on Rage, and John isnt sure when they will get back to the classic games even though it makes a lot of sense. He also explained that while both Doom II RPG [$3.99] and Wolfenstein RPG [$1.99] have done well on mobile phones, their performance on the App Store has been less than ideal, leading to the decision to not bring the Orcs & Elves games over to iOS.

Carmack admits hes had a lot of fun working with iOS 4 recently, and wished he had more time to devote to it. And while its more than a little disappointing that we wont see the classic id games anytime soon, with how impressive the Rage demo was, Im A-OK with John Carmack and the rest of the id Software team working on the forefront of iPhone development instead of focusing on porting retro hits I doubt Im alone in that.