John Carmack is the man's man of gaming. The programmer who took up rocket science in his spare time, and co-creator of id Software recently lost his mobile phone. He quotes, "A little while ago I misplaced the old phone I usually take to [Carmack's rocket company] Armadillo [Aerospace], and my wife picked up a more modern one for me. It had a nice color screen and a bunch of bad java game demos on it. The bad java games did it... So, for the past month or so I have been spending about a day a week on cell phone development."

Carmack doesn't believe that the cell phone, with it's lack of a standard four-direction pad and limited, 2" screen can show a great deal of moodiness, so he's opted to develop an RPG, describes as "Doom meets Bard's Tale." Carmack spoke one complaint, however, and that was about the J2ME, Java for cell phones. "The biggest problem is that Java is really slow," he said. "On a pure cpu/memory/display/communications level, most modern cell phones should be considerably better gaming platforms than a Game Boy Advance. With Java, on most phones you are left with about the CPU power of an original 4.77 MHz IBM PC, and lousy control over everything."

The game is being co-developed by Fountainhead Entertainment, and will likely be published by Jamdat. No release date or price has yet been set.

• GameSpot