The Masters of Doom is a great read. It details the rise of the two Johns of id Software. Man those guys worked hard. So, when you hear Carmack discuss gaming you have to listen.

GameDaily BIZ spoke to John Carmack at length about the new mobile studio, how id plans to attack the mobile space, Apple’s “horrible decisions,” overcoming the challenge of developing in Brew and Java for many handsets and more.

Everyone is jumping on his words about the iPhone and Apple, but there is a lot more to it, including his thoughts on the mobile gaming space in general:

There are a lot of reasons why mobile gaming is the way it is right now, and my initial assessment is probably shared by a lot of people. Most of the games are just crap; there are a lot of really bad things and shareware type games that people would give away for free on the PC. There aren’t nearly as many cases where you take a professional team of developers and try to do something really good. [That said,] you are also significantly hamstrung by the platform itself… the download limits, restrictions in the APIs, huge variability across the hardware platforms and the carriers. It’s an ugly market from a developer’s standpoint.

Consoles are clean and wonderful. You produce one title and it goes through one publisher and you sell millions of units if you’ve got a good title. In the mobile market, it’s ugly like a retail business. Domestically, you’ve got a handful of carriers and that’s reasonably clean, but then when you go into Europe or Asia, where half or more of your market is, you’re dealing with dozens and dozens of different [carriers] and it’s a model that’s not really comfortable for a lot of software developers. The tiny customization that you have to do means that the sort of hardcore technical programming winds up being not as relevant because you could do something that’s spectacularly clever on one platform and have it be something that doesn’t even work on a whole of other ones.

You have to approach it in a very different way, but I do think it’s clear that the games are getting a lot better. In the last couple years I’d like to think that we had something to do with that with Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves being critically acclaimed titles that sold really well. I know for a fact that we were instrumental in having Sprint raise their over-the-air download limit and to allow us to do a high-end Java version to make it look somewhat competitive with the Brew version. Initiatives and little things like this will allow games to improve a lot more over the coming years to the point where they won’t necessarily be an embarrassment to look at. You’ll be able to have games on the cell phone that look like games on other portable platforms like the DS and PSP. There’s no doubt that right now there are cell phone handsets that have all the hardware power necessary to be significantly better than the DS, but you don’t see that in the games themselves for all of these non-technical reasons.

When you look at the rise in casual gaming and merge that with the rise of the mobile, you have to think that it will be huge.