Doom III possible for Xbox

Going into E3, there was quite a bit of speculation that Activision and id Software would announce that Doom III would be a console game. As far back as last summer, John Carmack, id's lead programmer, commented that the game's advanced graphics engine would be best adapted to the Xbox out of the current generation of consoles. Yet at E3, Doom III was only announced for release on the PC, and it's scheduled for sometime in 2003. Nonetheless, id has left the door open for a console version of the game. Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software, said, "We will put more thought into the console side once we're done with the PC version, but Xbox looks the most attractive at this point."

There are a couple reasons why it may take a while for the game to make the switch from PC to consoles. Doom III is designed to push the bar for game graphics, and it's very hardware-intensive. The Doom III gameplay demo at E3 was running on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 PC with a next-generation ATI graphics card that has yet to be announced. Certainly, the game will run on less cutting-edge PCs, but it's too early to say how slower hardware will affect the quality of the game's graphics. In addition to heavy hardware requirements, another factor that will weigh on an Xbox version is the fact that the game is designed for the OpenGL graphics API rather than Microsoft's DirectX standard, which was adapted to the Xbox. We've seen past id games land on consoles, such as Quake III Revolution for Playstation 2, so it just may be a matter of time.

For more information, check out our coverage on the PC version of Doom III.