John Carmack surprised id with Wolfenstein for iPhone

John Carmack had Wolfenstein 3D all ready for the iPhone a week before anyone knew a thing about it, id bossman Todd Hollenshead has told VentureBeat.

The public found when word hit that an unlocked iPhone could visit the company website and take a look at the game.

"I got off the plane and all hell was breaking loose because someone wrote about how you could take a jail-broken iPhone and go to a secret web site to get Wolfenstein 3D Classic for free," he said.

"It was a secret page on ID’s web site. It was really source code that John Carmack had staged to put the game up on the Apple App Store.

"One programmer speculated that search programs will do random searches on web sites until they find something. They found it, it got linked to.

"Then everybody wanted to download the game for free. But you couldn’t do that. It was staged to go up on the Apple App Store.

"We got it up, and we’re selling it for $4.99."

Apparently an ID Classics label will soon be up on the App Store, along with the original Doom.