A carnage-soaked racing game is going to make an appearance on iOS devices soon. Stainless Games has announced that their classic game Carmageddon is headed to iPhone, iPod touch and iPad this summer. What’s more, it’ll be free, at least initially.

Taking its inspiration from cult car racing movies like Death Race 2000, Carmageddon is a 3D racing game originally released in 1997 that puts you behind the wheel of wild cars, pitting you against computer-controlled drivers in a race against the clock. Along the way you can pick up massive bonuses by performing “Cunning Stunts,” damaging your competitor’s vehicles and hitting pedestrians. The game was banned or censored in various countries for its graphic violence.

Stainless Games is wrapping up a Kickstarter fund raising campaign for Carmageddon: Reincarnation, a brand new game based on the classic franchise planned for multiple platforms including OS X. And with only a few days left to go and more than 12,000 backers already pledging money, they’ve significantly exceeded their ambitious $400,000 goal.

The company updated their Kickstarter page with a surprise note indicating that a couple of their programmers have been working on the iOS project “for just a few months.”

The game will appear as a Universal app, running in native sizes on iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. It will include several input control methods, including a gesture system to affect repair and recovery of your vehicle. An Action Replay mode will let you capture movies of your greatest feats, which you can upload to YouTube, and Game Center support will be included.

Stainless Games plans to release Carmageddon for iOS for free for the first 24 hours when it debuts this summer. An Android version is also planned.

As an aside, I spent many hours playing Carmageddon on my Bondi Blue iMac back in the day; I even outfitted the iMac with a 3Dfx-equipped graphics accelerator plugged into its mezzanine slot so I could see the game in glorious accelerated 3D. Outside of Baldur’s Gate, which is also due for an iOS resurrection this summer, I can’t think of many older game ports to iOS I’ve looked forward to more.