Legends id software, creators of Doom and Quake and Hexen are taking their games mobile officially.

To that end Id Software announced a new division, id Mobile, and plans to develop mobile versions of its classic games Quake and Wolfenstein, as well as a sequel to the cellphone game hit, Doom RPG.

“We are operating on the assumption that mobile gaming has a potential for huge growth,” says id co-founder John Carmack. “It’s at a tipping point. Everybody has a phone, and almost every phone is powerful enough to do good games on it.”

The Mesquite, Texas, game maker is no mobile-game newcomer. Released two years ago, Doom RPG for cellphones has sold more than 1 million copies. Sales of last year’s Orcs & Elves have topped 400,000. Both of those action games (typical cost $7-$10) were co-developed by id with Fountainhead Entertainment, a company founded by Carmack’s wife, Katherine Anna Kang. A former director of business development at id, she will now serve also as id Mobile’s president.

They expect the id name to help draw the attention of potential creative talent to a sector of the industry that’s often considered “the ghetto of game development,” Carmack says. “It’s going to be easier to attract more people to work for a project when they are actually working for id.”
New mobile games from id include a Nintendo DS version of Orcs & Elves ($30, out this week) and Orcs & Elves II, which is expected to be available from major MNOs by December.

The rise in casual gaming internationally is expected to help drive mobile-gaming revenues from less than $5 billion this year to nearly $10 billion worldwide by 2009, suggests a recent forecast from U.K.-based Juniper Research.
“The whole reason we are in the mobile arena now is I was just really appalled at how bad (cellphone games) were,” Carmack says. “We’re already making profit on 2 million units of games (sold), but we are kind of holding out this hope there might be a breakout moment when the industry gets five to 10 times larger.”

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