Dear Reader:
John Carmack - Nintendo put together Wii U presentation for ZeniMax, bringing Rage tech to Wii U, and a canned Wii game
They made a big presentation to the ZeniMax companies and I said, “Do I want to fly up there?” This was just last month or something. But I said, “No, I really need to stay here and just work on Rage right now.” But you know the technology level on there brings it up to parity with the other consoles, which is nice for us.Previously, the Wii was not a target. Id Tech 5 was just not suitable for the Wii at all. We seriously talked about possibly using the iOS Rage technology that I built for that for a Wii game. It would fit perfectly from a technology standpoint, and I think would have been really pretty cool as a Wii game, but we decided that it wasn’t the right time to jump into the Wii market.
But now that we’re looking at another platform that is eminently suitable for the technology, I’m sure we’re going to try and bring it up on there. But it will become a market question of do we think that there will be people there that won’t be served by one of the other SKUs? If you’re going to have a serious hardcore game on there, the Wii is usually the hardcore gamer’s second or third console. Even if we could have shipped Rage in full glory on the Wii, it probably wouldn’t have made a whole lot of sense because people that want Rage probably also have a PC, 360, or PS3 that could do the game better justice.
So we’ll be seeing how the market plays out on there. I’m kind of excited about the touch-screen aspect on there. I think that probably has broader general utility for games than most of the motion control stuff, where you really have to design a game around motion control and you can’t just tack it onto a finely crafted FPS. But I think the DS has really shown what the extra little touch screen can do–almost any game can do something useful with that. - John Carmack
It’s great to hear that Nintendo put together a presentation for ZeniMax concerning Wii U. I’m sad to hear that Carmack didn’t attend, but at least he seems to be seriously considering the platform for future projects.