I'm not sure you can count those as side projects (the games, not the aerospace company, which is a side project -- but it is an actual company!). Those are products shipped by some of the biggest publishers in the world.
That would be like someone at MS saying that their side project was a new feature in Word.
Wolf3D for the iPhone was supposed to be programmed by a different team. He simply found it to be a poor port when they presented it and wrote his own version in a couple of weeks. Seems like a side project to me, regardless of its distribution.
But that's not how a side project is typically defined. Again, if I did a new feature in IBM DB2 that took me a day, would you consider it a side project?
The issue at hand is if someone doesn't program in their "spare time" or have "side projects" are they a bad programmer.
So what is a "side project" and when people ask you questions in an interview like, "what are some of your side projects?", what are they asking?
They're not asking what did you ship as part of a corporate entity in most cases. They want to know, specifically what did you do outside the context of your job. If you work for EA, its hard to claim that an EA game is your side project. Just like someone at MS isn't likely to claim that a new Word feature is their side project, even if they did all the coding for it over the weekend.
And if he ported Emacs to the iPhone that would be a side project, by most measures. He'd have to release the code since its GPLed and ID is not likely to sell it.
That would be like someone at MS saying that their side project was a new feature in Word.