Speaking with Kotaku, Id Software co-founder and chief technologist John Carmack calls working with Apple “a rollercoaster ride,” referring to the company’s on again, off again relationship with game developers like him.

Id Software is the legendary developer of the Doom and Quake first person shooter series. Many of Id’s games have come to the Macintosh, and the company has recently begun publishing titles for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Carmack famously used NeXTSTEP to develop Doom (though the game was released first for Windows); Mac OS X can trace its ancestry to NeXTSTEP (Steve Jobs returned to Apple after Apple acquired NeXT, which he founded). Carmack has been featured on stage at Apple keynotes alongside Steve Jobs at Macworld Expos in the past, but that doesn’t mean he always has unfettered access to what’s going on in Cupertino.

“I’ll be invited up on stage for a keynote one month and then I’ll say something they don’t like and I can be blacklisted for six months,” he said.

Carmack noted that he now has “real man on the inside” at Apple these days in the form of Graeme Devine, who now works for Apple as an iPhone developer. Devine’s credits include The 7th Guest and its sequel The 11th Hour, two early graphical adventure CD-ROM successes. He went on to work at Id Software on Quake III Arena and Quake III Team Arena, where he became known to Mac enthusiasts as a booster of the platform. He went on to work at Ensemble Studios, makers of the Age of Empires series.

Carmack doesn’t think that Apple’s continued success with the iPhone OS as a mobile game platform has changed the company’s opinion of games in general. “At the highest level of Apple, in their heart of hearts they’re not proud of the iPhone being a game machine, they wish it was something else,” he said.