Tuesday, July 15 and Wednesday, July 16 (11:59 PM - Midnight, ET/PT)

GTTV's E3 Minute

Geoff Keighley is on the E3 show floor to give Spike viewers the inside scoop on the sights and sounds of the show. Also tune in for more world exclusive surprises including something special from id Software and Raven Software.

Wow, great find. The Raven / id part sounds interesting!

Edit: I still wonder how stuff from id Software will be shown at E3 when they are not in the ESA anymore...

Oh hell yes!!! Finally some news about RTCWII, it's been so long without a single screenshot or interview, this better be the all- redeeming gold anouncement.

I hope there will also be some more Rage media I can watch over, and over, and over.....

Perhaps still left-overs from the previous rumours?

Oh hell yes!!! Finally some news about RTCWII, it's been so long without a single screenshot or interview, this better be the all- redeeming gold anouncement.

I hope there will also be some more Rage media I can watch over, and over, and over.....

I don't know really.. This info is from a press release from yesterday. Maybe Gametrailers didn't visit id Software / Raven Software in relation to E3, but decided to show something from the game now anyway, when the video game industry gets the most attention? I don't know...

Friday, July 18 (Midnight - 12:30 AM, ET/PT)

"GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley: E3 2008"

Host Geoff Keighley goes head-to-head with the industry heavyweights from the big 3 console companies to delve into their plans for the coming year. Also see the world premiere of Quake Live from id Software and the exclusive debut of the teaser trailer for Tomb Raider: Underworld from Eidos and Crystal Dynamics.

Wednesday, July 17 (11:59 PM - Midnight, ET/PT)

GTTV's E3 Minute

Geoff Keighley is on the E3 show floor to give some handshakes. Also tune in for more world exclusive surprises including quake5 and Doom4 from id Software. George Broussard is also on stage too.

The ESA said with early RSVPs they were going to meet their attendance expectation of 4,000 individuals. They also released the full roster of exhibitors currently scheduled to participate, including: 1UP Network; Akella; Atari Inc.; Bethesda Softworks; Capcom USA Inc.; Crave Entertainment; Codemasters; D3Publisher of America; Deep Silver; Disney Interactive Studios, Inc.; Electronic Arts; Eidos Interactive; IGN.com; Indie Games; Jagex, Ltd.; Konami Digital Entertainment; LucasArts; Majesco Entertainment Company; Microsoft Corporation; Midway Games, Inc.; MTV Games; Namco Bandai Games America, Inc.; Natsume, Inc.; Nintendo of America Inc.; Novint Technologies, Inc.; Nyko Technologies; Powered by Game Spy; Rebellion; SEGA of America, Inc.; Serious Games Initiative; Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc.; Sony Online Entertainment Inc.; Southpeak Games; Square Enix USA; Take-Two Interactive; Tecmo; THQ Inc.; Toshiba America Information Systems; Ubisoft Entertainment Inc.; Valve Software; and, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment Inc. Organizers said they are expecting additional companies to sign-on.

We met id Software's CEO for an in-depth chat about Rage, the astonishing id Tech 5 engine and what it means to the games industry at large. Plus: comments on gaming for the Mac, Steam, Epic, Romero and what the future holds.

By Adam Doree, July 8, 2008


At the recent Ubidays 2008 event, a fellow journalist and I were chatting about the Beyond Good & Evil 2 teaser trailer shown the night before. This trailer, argued the games mag editor, was visually far ahead of anything we'll see this generation, and shows what the next wave of systems will be capable of. The arresting level of character and environment detail is, sure enough, worlds apart from the true reality of most current-gen productions - and is more comparable to overzealous target trailers shown three years ago. But my argument was that current-gen CAN basically look this good. I've seen it first-hand in Rage from id Software. I've seen it running not only on a PC, but also on PS3, 360 and Mac -- looking near identical on each.

Rage runs on id's next-generation "id Tech 5" engine, which will also power Doom 4 and is the successor to the Doom 3 engine that blew us away when it was first shown in 2002. And in my view, Rage offers a comparable level of visual fidelity as in Ubisoft's BG&E2 teaser video, which is running on unspecified hardware after all. In other words, Rage is the most impressive looking game we have actually seen running by quite some margin.

But id Tech 5 means bigger things for the Texas-based firm - and for gaming at large - than just its own two forthcoming games that run on it. More than ever before, id is now going to be all about licensing its technology for the rest of the development scene to benefit from, and as we learn in this interview, they're serious about competing with rival tech from Epic.

Todd Hollenshead, who joined id Software in 1996, is CEO and a key part of John Carmack's super-elite development outfit. There'll likely be further news on all this at QuakeCon 2008, which runs from July 31 - August 3 in Dallas, Texas. But in the meantime, we hope you enjoy this exclusive interview with Todd, who was also joined by Rage's lead designer, Matt Hooper.


Kikizo: No messing around, this is the best looking game in existence. But that's not to say we're not going to try and give you a hard time in this interview.

Todd Hollenshead: That's fair enough! We actually like the more challenging questions; they make us think about things. Sometimes things that we hadn't thought about before, so that we can go back and say, hey, they asked this and we hadn't figured out.

Kikizo: What was your background coming into id Software?

Todd: I started with id in 1996, right around the time Quake was coming out. id was a client of mine a couple of years before that, I was actually in public accounting and worked for Arthur Andersen for five years before that.

Kikizo: Einstein started as an accountant.

Todd: Hah, don't compare me like that - I can't live up to that! [laughs]

Kikizo: To what extent would you say that id is in competition with Epic, both now and moving forwards?

Todd: Certainly from a licensing standpoint I think that right now those guys are quite frankly the industry leader, and we're obviously in competition with them because we're going to be talking to the same people about licensing our technology for similar types of games. I think that what they do with their tech is different than we do with ours in a number of respects, and so maybe there are some people that our technology fits a little bit better with; maybe there are some people that they have a better fit with Epic. And I expect that you will see that. But I really do think that regardless of whatever your preconceived notions of that technology are, if you're looking for something as a multiplatform solution, if you don't take a hard look at id Tech 5, then you are making a very, very bad mistake. Probably a mistake that ought to cost you your job.

Kikizo: The Doom 3 engine [id Tech 4] was underused as a licensable technology. So other than id Tech 5 looking fantastic, what will be the other reasons to use it?

Todd: Well there are a number of reasons. When you talk about next generation technology, I think the first thing that everybody thinks of is what they see. So that's natural - does it look good, do you have good performance, can you do amazing things visually. Because it's a technology-driven industry, and I think people who say it's not a technology-driven industry don't know what industry that they're in, and they probably won't be here for very long - we've seen those people come and go over the years, when they say we're at the apex of technology and something else is going to take over. And I really do think those people are wrong. I think that there's a long ways for technology to go to continue to drive innovation and change within the business, and I think that happens on the hardware side, and on the software side as well, and certainly that has been one of the core things that has been key to id's success.

So you start with visuals, but there are other things as well. From a visual standpoint you can do the exact same thing on id Tech 5 across platforms; you have the PC here and the PS3 here, and the reason you don't see any changes is the art is identical; we don't have a PC art team, a 360 art team and a PS3 art team; we don't have two guys to take the PC art and crunch it down to make it work on consoles. It's the identical media that works across all platforms, and that allows us as a small team to develop it on four platforms simultaneously without really incremental cost to do so.

Just using id as an example because I know us better than anyone else, Quake Wars was a multiplatform game as well; we had Splash Damage who's on a completely different time zone in the UK working on the PC, Nerve working on the 360 version in Dallas, which is convenient, but then Activision Foster City working on the PS3 version in California - we're spending millions of dollars on doing additional versions, and just the management hassle of trying to do all that, if you're not pulling out your hair it's going grey as you try to manage all of that - to avoid that hassle factor is huge.

Probably the next core thing as a consideration of technology licensing is, what is the reputation of the developer, what is their track record? And probably in that respect it is unparalleled. I mean there isn't a guy in the industry that I can think of who's better than John Carmack. When you look at the success and the track record of our licensees in the past - games like Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty - I would rather have those three games as licensees than thirty games that nobody remembers. And probably the final important thing is that, distinct from the past, in which id licensees have had to work with tools that are probably not as robust as tools provided by other competitive rendering engines, is that now, because our company has grown, we've been able to have a guy specifically working tools, and we have a guy who's specifically dedicated to supporting our engine licensees. And the tools are very intuitive, very powerful, and they are created how artists and designers think, not how programmers think. So it is really a whole different paradigm in terms of making development as pain free as possible to allow people to get up and running with the technology as fast as possible, and minimise the sort of wheel spinning that goes on at the start while learning new things.

Kikizo: For all its output, id is actually a small development outfit right?

Todd: Compared to the rest of the industry we're actually quite small. For what you see here, there are about 33 people in development staff and not even all of them are working full time on Rage. We have four platforms at Alpha level on the technology all up and running at effectively 60hz.

Kikizo: Is this environment we're seeing reflective of an actual game level that we'll see in Rage?

Matt Hooper: Absolutely. This is actually the race track that we use in our internal 'Rage Cup' back at the office. It's one of the first race tracks in the game. We actually compete until midnight on a regular basis. [laughs]

Todd: Not only are all these assets from the game, but this is not running on a programmer box, where you take all the things that trouble you and that don't work right, and magically wave them away. This is actual production content. One of the cool things with the Megatexture technology is that you can have this fast environment, outdoor area - Enemy Territory Quake Wars is big [on detail], but the biggest stuff we can do in id Tech 5 is about eight times that - and this [environment shown in Rage] is only about a quarter of our 'capacity'. You can go zoom down and see where artists put drops of oil in the dirt as the cars went over, or they can go carve a tiny message into the back of a rock.

Kikizo: Even on the console builds we're looking at, it's still really early and yet it's running at a pretty stable 60fps.

Matt: That's not an accident, that's very much a conscious effort, and it comes from John Carmack on the technology side. Usually we're pushing the envelope so much that by the end of the project that's when the technology is ready. But right now having it run close to 60fps on all of the platforms, that's a big deal. We're pretty focussed on that, it's a key thing.

Todd: Everybody loves to play FPS games at 60hz, and the pro guys want to run at 110 or whatever, but what we've found is especially for the driving feedback elements of it is that 60hz is really necessary to make it behave the way you want it to. Just from a technology standpoint it's important to recognise that what we're doing at 60hz, somebody could live with half the frame rate and double the visual fidelity in the game - make the game look completely different, but we're holding back on some of the things we could do from a visual standpoint because we feel like the frame rate is that important.

Kikizo: What is the significance of the game's name, Rage?

Todd: There's a number of aspects, several elements in the game where 'Rage' is appropriate. The most esoteric of those is that there's a lot of driving throughout the game - your avatar in the game is kind of your car, and you can modify that, soup it up, trick it out or whatever, so there is this 'gaRage' aspect, and the last four letters of the word gaRage are "-Rage". And then in the story to the game, one of the things you're trying to beat back is the oppressive nature of the regime that is trying to reassemble society - you're in a post-apocalyptic environment if you couldn't tell by what's going on here, so there's the sort of the 'Rage against the machine' element of it. And there's some vehicular combat, so there's the 'road Rage' element as well. We thought the name Rage would fit in well with a lot of different aspects of the game.

Kikizo: What do you think of the actual driving in FPS games generally? There was quite a lot in Half-Life 2 but where are you going to take it?

Matt: We have some very definite and clear goals in mind. The Half-Life 2 stuff was great; I think they had a narrow focus on what they wanted to do with vehicles; we're going to open that up a lot with what we do here. It's more like your vehicle becomes your avatar, it becomes a part of you, but while we're adding elements, we're not going to stray from action - it's fun and action, that's the two things which we have on a whiteboard in front of all our designers, that's what we're focused on. We probably won't go with this PGR focused driving, with performance and things like that; it will be a kind of this fun thing. You know what kind of guys we are at id - we just want to be able to literally jump into the car and then jump out and go and go into a cool environment and shoot.

Todd: It's not really intended to be like this hardcore racing game. I actually had an email with the Bizarre Creations guys, because I said something in an interview about being a big PGR3 fan, which I am. We can use that as a benchmark for how a car should react when you're using the controller and things like that, but we're not trying to compete with them with the driving elements of Rage. The driving element alone, it's almost like PGR meets Gran Turismo meets Midnight Club meets MotorStorm meets Carmageddon! You're going to have a lot of ramps, there's going to be a lot of broken shit that you can fall into. I mean literally if you don't hit that ramp at the right speed you're going off into the ditch!

Kikizo: You have said in the past that id is good at generating new IP, but obviously you have got a tonne of existing IP as well. This being your new engine, how much should you reinvent existing IP?

Todd: Our focus in my mind specifically, was finish Enemy Territory Quake Wars, and then do Rage and id Tech 5, and of course Quake Live [a free version of Quake III Arena launched and played via a web browser]. We have an enormous amount of stuff on our plate, and really to think about what we're working on next is premature, because we're focused on making Rage an awesome game, and I mean we're still fairly early on in the process of making the game, and none of us have Rage-burnout yet, at least not that I'm aware of! Then in terms of what we do next, I think there could be some reasons to do a sequel to Rage, to go back and revisit one of our other games [eg Doom 4, announced], or to create another IP as well. So it depends on a number of strategic decisions that we take and how the future unfolds, and I can probably give you a much better answer to that question in a couple of - I'd rather not go out there and make some half-assed guess and have John Carmack read it and say, Todd's lost his mind!

Kikizo: Would you say there were any weaknesses in Doom 3 that need to be corrected?

Matt: I wouldn't call them weaknesses. We had very specific goals in mind, and we had a relatively small team with brand new, state-of-the-art technology, and I think we took advantage of that really well. I think the sales show that. So design wise, because our focus was narrow, I don't have any regrets there.

Todd: I think there are three people on the internet that keep making these posts that Doom 3 was "bad", and they get no credibility from any other people... there's some mass-misperception out there. I get this occasionally - why don't I think Doom 3 was successful? We sold over three million units! It's the most successful game in id's history.

Matt: The things we're doing with id Tech 5 have really opened things up design-wise. I work closely with Tim Willits who's the creative director on id Tech 5 and the guiding force on Rage, and we're going to do some things which I think are just going to blow people way - it's just going to be on a whole new level. Things that you have never seen in any game before, some things borrowed from different games, really action focused. Just as a designer we can do things in these giant worlds and with these vehicle systems and still maintain the things that people love id for, which is that control and the FPS action combat, but now we can introduce all these other elements, so it's really opened things up. On the design side, we've never had more energy, it just makes us giddy to be able to use this tech.

Kikizo: When we last spoke to Gabe Newell, one of the interesting things we discussed was the Mac. His view is that the people in charge of games at Apple change jobs every couple years and that there's no consistency or they don't take it seriously enough. But here we see you have this running perfectly on Mac. Would you agree with his comments on Apple gaming?

Todd: It's a true comment. I think historically, Gabe is absolutely right. The Apple guys will probably frown to hear me say that, but I mean there are facts and there are facts [laughs], and the fact is, that over the years Apple has shown an interest in gaming and then not followed through on it. Certainly our hope is that they are going to follow through. I do think they have made a significant investment... Jobs had a limited amount of time [at his WWDC 07 keynote] and John Carmack isn't the kind of guy who's going to get up on stage just to try and please Steve Jobs. John has his own ideas and he's his own guy, and even the persona of Steve Jobs isn't going to work on John very well, if at all! But if Steve had games on his show; not only did he give time to id, he gave time to EA, and I do think that it demonstrates at least a commitment at a high level to sharing the platform's face, if you will, with games.

But I mean, it is about the follow up. Now Apple was great to work with us; we were in some dialogue and they asked what we thought of having it on Mac, they sent some engineers down and they made a commitment about drivers and how they were going to support this stuff in the future, and I certainly hope they follow through on it, because with the hardware now, you're not having to deal with this weird Power PC architecture; they have Intel chips and all that stuff, and it does make it a whole lot easier for us to work with it. I don't think that they're hamstrung at a performance level - they don't have to create these weird Apple-only benchmarks.

Kikizo: What has the sales performance of id's stuff on Steam been like?

Todd: Did you ask Gabe that question as well?

Kikizo: No - so you can say whatever you like!

Todd: [Laughs] Well, I can't, because we actually have a confidentiality agreement between us...

Kikizo: Have you been pleased with the performance?

Todd: We were pleasantly surprised. In fact there was a little wager at id, and it was well over what we anticipated. For one, I think Steam is a good platform. For two, I think we have compelling content, and for three, I think we had some really nice bundles that resonated with people in terms of offering a pretty good value. And we did actually go in and spend some time and figure out a solution so that all the old DOS games would actually be able to work and not be broken, using the DOSBox program, so we want to give credit to those guys because we had some interns working on it, and they forgot to include some credit files, and the open source community got their underwear like seven feet up their butt over it... but it was really completely inadvertent on our part, we had some inexperienced people working on it and they made a mistake. What they did I have no idea, but I do want to give credit where credit's due on that. But it wasn't without effort on our part to make all that stuff work too.

Kikizo: I want to ask about John Romero [an id co-founder] - I believe his departure from id was amicable, but do you know what he's up to today and might you work with him again in future?

Todd: I don't really foresee us working with John, because we sort of did that already and that's past history. The last I heard about Mr Romero is that he had started a new company in San Francisco and that he was working on an MMO game.

Kikizo: What will the trend in gaming be for the next ten years?

Todd: I still believe that the industry over the next ten years is going to be driven primarily by technology, and I think that it has been since its existence over 25 years or however long you want to say it's been around. The chief innovations have been enabled by the rapid pace of technological progress on the hardware, and then by what engineers like John and others have been able to do on the software side. And I think that is the enabling factor that allows us to do all these things like a higher art form so you're not just moving white blocks around a screen or chasing dots through a maze. All that stuff is fun, but when you talk about emotional aspects of games, or better storytelling, or more interactivity in the environments, just more visual richness, all these things are constraints put on the industry that we work within. So I do see the future being driven by what the pace of technological change is, and when John talks about that stuff - and he's been right for fifteen years so I'm not going to swim against him on stuff like this - when you see what he's done here at the texture level, and being able to make the perfect level - glorious, unique, huge, vast and at the same time incredibly detailed - and then when he talks about the next horizon is geometry, I think you start to talk about things that you've really only been able to do with massive offline render farms, being able to be done and realised in real time. What sort of characters, worlds and interactivity you can develop, is being driven primarily by what technology enables. So it's a technical question, but I think ultimately the answer is that the industry will be driven by that. It will allow the artistic side of the industry to shine through.

Todd and Matt, thanks for your time.

The 2008 Chevrolet Corvette Coupe to be given away will be Jetstream Blue, a new color introduced in 2008, with 3LT trim and a Z51 performance package. The car will be on display in the main exhibition area.

id Software Working on New Multiplatform Tilte?
With E3 around the corner we can expect many new announcements to be made, one apparently coming from id Software according to recent reports. Giving credence to this rumor is an updated jobs page on id Software's website where the DOOM/Quake powerhouse is looking for new designers, artists and programmers with PS3, Xbox 360, and PC experience, for a new, yet unannounced project.

Nope it was not, Robobliz was the first UE3 game.

i think what he meant was that Rage will be the first game released with idtech5. i'm sure they are letting others get started with it.

Right. You are judging the entire game because you saw A FEW scanned images from a magazine...... OK...

Tuesday, July 15 and Wednesday, July 16 (11:59 PM - Midnight, ET/PT)

GTTV's E3 Minute

Geoff Keighley is on the E3 show floor to give Spike viewers the inside scoop on the sights and sounds of the show. Also tune in for more world exclusive surprises including something special from id Software and Raven Software.

Wow, great find. The Raven / id part sounds interesting!

Edit: I still wonder how stuff from id Software will be shown at E3 when they are not in the ESA anymore...

Oh hell yes!!! Finally some news about RTCWII, it's been so long without a single screenshot or interview, this better be the all- redeeming gold anouncement.

I hope there will also be some more Rage media I can watch over, and over, and over.....

Perhaps still left-overs from the previous rumours?

Oh hell yes!!! Finally some news about RTCWII, it's been so long without a single screenshot or interview, this better be the all- redeeming gold anouncement.

I hope there will also be some more Rage media I can watch over, and over, and over.....

I don't know really.. This info is from a press release from yesterday. Maybe Gametrailers didn't visit id Software / Raven Software in relation to E3, but decided to show something from the game now anyway, when the video game industry gets the most attention? I don't know...

Friday, July 18 (Midnight - 12:30 AM, ET/PT)

"GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley: E3 2008"

Host Geoff Keighley goes head-to-head with the industry heavyweights from the big 3 console companies to delve into their plans for the coming year. Also see the world premiere of Quake Live from id Software and the exclusive debut of the teaser trailer for Tomb Raider: Underworld from Eidos and Crystal Dynamics.

Wednesday, July 17 (11:59 PM - Midnight, ET/PT)

GTTV's E3 Minute

Geoff Keighley is on the E3 show floor to give some handshakes. Also tune in for more world exclusive surprises including quake5 and Doom4 from id Software. George Broussard is also on stage too.

The ESA said with early RSVPs they were going to meet their attendance expectation of 4,000 individuals. They also released the full roster of exhibitors currently scheduled to participate, including: 1UP Network; Akella; Atari Inc.; Bethesda Softworks; Capcom USA Inc.; Crave Entertainment; Codemasters; D3Publisher of America; Deep Silver; Disney Interactive Studios, Inc.; Electronic Arts; Eidos Interactive; IGN.com; Indie Games; Jagex, Ltd.; Konami Digital Entertainment; LucasArts; Majesco Entertainment Company; Microsoft Corporation; Midway Games, Inc.; MTV Games; Namco Bandai Games America, Inc.; Natsume, Inc.; Nintendo of America Inc.; Novint Technologies, Inc.; Nyko Technologies; Powered by Game Spy; Rebellion; SEGA of America, Inc.; Serious Games Initiative; Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc.; Sony Online Entertainment Inc.; Southpeak Games; Square Enix USA; Take-Two Interactive; Tecmo; THQ Inc.; Toshiba America Information Systems; Ubisoft Entertainment Inc.; Valve Software; and, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment Inc. Organizers said they are expecting additional companies to sign-on.

We met id Software's CEO for an in-depth chat about Rage, the astonishing id Tech 5 engine and what it means to the games industry at large. Plus: comments on gaming for the Mac, Steam, Epic, Romero and what the future holds.

By Adam Doree, July 8, 2008


At the recent Ubidays 2008 event, a fellow journalist and I were chatting about the Beyond Good & Evil 2 teaser trailer shown the night before. This trailer, argued the games mag editor, was visually far ahead of anything we'll see this generation, and shows what the next wave of systems will be capable of. The arresting level of character and environment detail is, sure enough, worlds apart from the true reality of most current-gen productions - and is more comparable to overzealous target trailers shown three years ago. But my argument was that current-gen CAN basically look this good. I've seen it first-hand in Rage from id Software. I've seen it running not only on a PC, but also on PS3, 360 and Mac -- looking near identical on each.

Rage runs on id's next-generation "id Tech 5" engine, which will also power Doom 4 and is the successor to the Doom 3 engine that blew us away when it was first shown in 2002. And in my view, Rage offers a comparable level of visual fidelity as in Ubisoft's BG&E2 teaser video, which is running on unspecified hardware after all. In other words, Rage is the most impressive looking game we have actually seen running by quite some margin.

But id Tech 5 means bigger things for the Texas-based firm - and for gaming at large - than just its own two forthcoming games that run on it. More than ever before, id is now going to be all about licensing its technology for the rest of the development scene to benefit from, and as we learn in this interview, they're serious about competing with rival tech from Epic.

Todd Hollenshead, who joined id Software in 1996, is CEO and a key part of John Carmack's super-elite development outfit. There'll likely be further news on all this at QuakeCon 2008, which runs from July 31 - August 3 in Dallas, Texas. But in the meantime, we hope you enjoy this exclusive interview with Todd, who was also joined by Rage's lead designer, Matt Hooper.


Kikizo: No messing around, this is the best looking game in existence. But that's not to say we're not going to try and give you a hard time in this interview.

Todd Hollenshead: That's fair enough! We actually like the more challenging questions; they make us think about things. Sometimes things that we hadn't thought about before, so that we can go back and say, hey, they asked this and we hadn't figured out.

Kikizo: What was your background coming into id Software?

Todd: I started with id in 1996, right around the time Quake was coming out. id was a client of mine a couple of years before that, I was actually in public accounting and worked for Arthur Andersen for five years before that.

Kikizo: Einstein started as an accountant.

Todd: Hah, don't compare me like that - I can't live up to that! [laughs]

Kikizo: To what extent would you say that id is in competition with Epic, both now and moving forwards?

Todd: Certainly from a licensing standpoint I think that right now those guys are quite frankly the industry leader, and we're obviously in competition with them because we're going to be talking to the same people about licensing our technology for similar types of games. I think that what they do with their tech is different than we do with ours in a number of respects, and so maybe there are some people that our technology fits a little bit better with; maybe there are some people that they have a better fit with Epic. And I expect that you will see that. But I really do think that regardless of whatever your preconceived notions of that technology are, if you're looking for something as a multiplatform solution, if you don't take a hard look at id Tech 5, then you are making a very, very bad mistake. Probably a mistake that ought to cost you your job.

Kikizo: The Doom 3 engine [id Tech 4] was underused as a licensable technology. So other than id Tech 5 looking fantastic, what will be the other reasons to use it?

Todd: Well there are a number of reasons. When you talk about next generation technology, I think the first thing that everybody thinks of is what they see. So that's natural - does it look good, do you have good performance, can you do amazing things visually. Because it's a technology-driven industry, and I think people who say it's not a technology-driven industry don't know what industry that they're in, and they probably won't be here for very long - we've seen those people come and go over the years, when they say we're at the apex of technology and something else is going to take over. And I really do think those people are wrong. I think that there's a long ways for technology to go to continue to drive innovation and change within the business, and I think that happens on the hardware side, and on the software side as well, and certainly that has been one of the core things that has been key to id's success.

So you start with visuals, but there are other things as well. From a visual standpoint you can do the exact same thing on id Tech 5 across platforms; you have the PC here and the PS3 here, and the reason you don't see any changes is the art is identical; we don't have a PC art team, a 360 art team and a PS3 art team; we don't have two guys to take the PC art and crunch it down to make it work on consoles. It's the identical media that works across all platforms, and that allows us as a small team to develop it on four platforms simultaneously without really incremental cost to do so.

Just using id as an example because I know us better than anyone else, Quake Wars was a multiplatform game as well; we had Splash Damage who's on a completely different time zone in the UK working on the PC, Nerve working on the 360 version in Dallas, which is convenient, but then Activision Foster City working on the PS3 version in California - we're spending millions of dollars on doing additional versions, and just the management hassle of trying to do all that, if you're not pulling out your hair it's going grey as you try to manage all of that - to avoid that hassle factor is huge.

Probably the next core thing as a consideration of technology licensing is, what is the reputation of the developer, what is their track record? And probably in that respect it is unparalleled. I mean there isn't a guy in the industry that I can think of who's better than John Carmack. When you look at the success and the track record of our licensees in the past - games like Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty - I would rather have those three games as licensees than thirty games that nobody remembers. And probably the final important thing is that, distinct from the past, in which id licensees have had to work with tools that are probably not as robust as tools provided by other competitive rendering engines, is that now, because our company has grown, we've been able to have a guy specifically working tools, and we have a guy who's specifically dedicated to supporting our engine licensees. And the tools are very intuitive, very powerful, and they are created how artists and designers think, not how programmers think. So it is really a whole different paradigm in terms of making development as pain free as possible to allow people to get up and running with the technology as fast as possible, and minimise the sort of wheel spinning that goes on at the start while learning new things.

Kikizo: For all its output, id is actually a small development outfit right?

Todd: Compared to the rest of the industry we're actually quite small. For what you see here, there are about 33 people in development staff and not even all of them are working full time on Rage. We have four platforms at Alpha level on the technology all up and running at effectively 60hz.

Kikizo: Is this environment we're seeing reflective of an actual game level that we'll see in Rage?

Matt Hooper: Absolutely. This is actually the race track that we use in our internal 'Rage Cup' back at the office. It's one of the first race tracks in the game. We actually compete until midnight on a regular basis. [laughs]

Todd: Not only are all these assets from the game, but this is not running on a programmer box, where you take all the things that trouble you and that don't work right, and magically wave them away. This is actual production content. One of the cool things with the Megatexture technology is that you can have this fast environment, outdoor area - Enemy Territory Quake Wars is big [on detail], but the biggest stuff we can do in id Tech 5 is about eight times that - and this [environment shown in Rage] is only about a quarter of our 'capacity'. You can go zoom down and see where artists put drops of oil in the dirt as the cars went over, or they can go carve a tiny message into the back of a rock.

Kikizo: Even on the console builds we're looking at, it's still really early and yet it's running at a pretty stable 60fps.

Matt: That's not an accident, that's very much a conscious effort, and it comes from John Carmack on the technology side. Usually we're pushing the envelope so much that by the end of the project that's when the technology is ready. But right now having it run close to 60fps on all of the platforms, that's a big deal. We're pretty focussed on that, it's a key thing.

Todd: Everybody loves to play FPS games at 60hz, and the pro guys want to run at 110 or whatever, but what we've found is especially for the driving feedback elements of it is that 60hz is really necessary to make it behave the way you want it to. Just from a technology standpoint it's important to recognise that what we're doing at 60hz, somebody could live with half the frame rate and double the visual fidelity in the game - make the game look completely different, but we're holding back on some of the things we could do from a visual standpoint because we feel like the frame rate is that important.

Kikizo: What is the significance of the game's name, Rage?

Todd: There's a number of aspects, several elements in the game where 'Rage' is appropriate. The most esoteric of those is that there's a lot of driving throughout the game - your avatar in the game is kind of your car, and you can modify that, soup it up, trick it out or whatever, so there is this 'gaRage' aspect, and the last four letters of the word gaRage are "-Rage". And then in the story to the game, one of the things you're trying to beat back is the oppressive nature of the regime that is trying to reassemble society - you're in a post-apocalyptic environment if you couldn't tell by what's going on here, so there's the sort of the 'Rage against the machine' element of it. And there's some vehicular combat, so there's the 'road Rage' element as well. We thought the name Rage would fit in well with a lot of different aspects of the game.

Kikizo: What do you think of the actual driving in FPS games generally? There was quite a lot in Half-Life 2 but where are you going to take it?

Matt: We have some very definite and clear goals in mind. The Half-Life 2 stuff was great; I think they had a narrow focus on what they wanted to do with vehicles; we're going to open that up a lot with what we do here. It's more like your vehicle becomes your avatar, it becomes a part of you, but while we're adding elements, we're not going to stray from action - it's fun and action, that's the two things which we have on a whiteboard in front of all our designers, that's what we're focused on. We probably won't go with this PGR focused driving, with performance and things like that; it will be a kind of this fun thing. You know what kind of guys we are at id - we just want to be able to literally jump into the car and then jump out and go and go into a cool environment and shoot.

Todd: It's not really intended to be like this hardcore racing game. I actually had an email with the Bizarre Creations guys, because I said something in an interview about being a big PGR3 fan, which I am. We can use that as a benchmark for how a car should react when you're using the controller and things like that, but we're not trying to compete with them with the driving elements of Rage. The driving element alone, it's almost like PGR meets Gran Turismo meets Midnight Club meets MotorStorm meets Carmageddon! You're going to have a lot of ramps, there's going to be a lot of broken shit that you can fall into. I mean literally if you don't hit that ramp at the right speed you're going off into the ditch!

Kikizo: You have said in the past that id is good at generating new IP, but obviously you have got a tonne of existing IP as well. This being your new engine, how much should you reinvent existing IP?

Todd: Our focus in my mind specifically, was finish Enemy Territory Quake Wars, and then do Rage and id Tech 5, and of course Quake Live [a free version of Quake III Arena launched and played via a web browser]. We have an enormous amount of stuff on our plate, and really to think about what we're working on next is premature, because we're focused on making Rage an awesome game, and I mean we're still fairly early on in the process of making the game, and none of us have Rage-burnout yet, at least not that I'm aware of! Then in terms of what we do next, I think there could be some reasons to do a sequel to Rage, to go back and revisit one of our other games [eg Doom 4, announced], or to create another IP as well. So it depends on a number of strategic decisions that we take and how the future unfolds, and I can probably give you a much better answer to that question in a couple of - I'd rather not go out there and make some half-assed guess and have John Carmack read it and say, Todd's lost his mind!

Kikizo: Would you say there were any weaknesses in Doom 3 that need to be corrected?

Matt: I wouldn't call them weaknesses. We had very specific goals in mind, and we had a relatively small team with brand new, state-of-the-art technology, and I think we took advantage of that really well. I think the sales show that. So design wise, because our focus was narrow, I don't have any regrets there.

Todd: I think there are three people on the internet that keep making these posts that Doom 3 was "bad", and they get no credibility from any other people... there's some mass-misperception out there. I get this occasionally - why don't I think Doom 3 was successful? We sold over three million units! It's the most successful game in id's history.

Matt: The things we're doing with id Tech 5 have really opened things up design-wise. I work closely with Tim Willits who's the creative director on id Tech 5 and the guiding force on Rage, and we're going to do some things which I think are just going to blow people way - it's just going to be on a whole new level. Things that you have never seen in any game before, some things borrowed from different games, really action focused. Just as a designer we can do things in these giant worlds and with these vehicle systems and still maintain the things that people love id for, which is that control and the FPS action combat, but now we can introduce all these other elements, so it's really opened things up. On the design side, we've never had more energy, it just makes us giddy to be able to use this tech.

Kikizo: When we last spoke to Gabe Newell, one of the interesting things we discussed was the Mac. His view is that the people in charge of games at Apple change jobs every couple years and that there's no consistency or they don't take it seriously enough. But here we see you have this running perfectly on Mac. Would you agree with his comments on Apple gaming?

Todd: It's a true comment. I think historically, Gabe is absolutely right. The Apple guys will probably frown to hear me say that, but I mean there are facts and there are facts [laughs], and the fact is, that over the years Apple has shown an interest in gaming and then not followed through on it. Certainly our hope is that they are going to follow through. I do think they have made a significant investment... Jobs had a limited amount of time [at his WWDC 07 keynote] and John Carmack isn't the kind of guy who's going to get up on stage just to try and please Steve Jobs. John has his own ideas and he's his own guy, and even the persona of Steve Jobs isn't going to work on John very well, if at all! But if Steve had games on his show; not only did he give time to id, he gave time to EA, and I do think that it demonstrates at least a commitment at a high level to sharing the platform's face, if you will, with games.

But I mean, it is about the follow up. Now Apple was great to work with us; we were in some dialogue and they asked what we thought of having it on Mac, they sent some engineers down and they made a commitment about drivers and how they were going to support this stuff in the future, and I certainly hope they follow through on it, because with the hardware now, you're not having to deal with this weird Power PC architecture; they have Intel chips and all that stuff, and it does make it a whole lot easier for us to work with it. I don't think that they're hamstrung at a performance level - they don't have to create these weird Apple-only benchmarks.

Kikizo: What has the sales performance of id's stuff on Steam been like?

Todd: Did you ask Gabe that question as well?

Kikizo: No - so you can say whatever you like!

Todd: [Laughs] Well, I can't, because we actually have a confidentiality agreement between us...

Kikizo: Have you been pleased with the performance?

Todd: We were pleasantly surprised. In fact there was a little wager at id, and it was well over what we anticipated. For one, I think Steam is a good platform. For two, I think we have compelling content, and for three, I think we had some really nice bundles that resonated with people in terms of offering a pretty good value. And we did actually go in and spend some time and figure out a solution so that all the old DOS games would actually be able to work and not be broken, using the DOSBox program, so we want to give credit to those guys because we had some interns working on it, and they forgot to include some credit files, and the open source community got their underwear like seven feet up their butt over it... but it was really completely inadvertent on our part, we had some inexperienced people working on it and they made a mistake. What they did I have no idea, but I do want to give credit where credit's due on that. But it wasn't without effort on our part to make all that stuff work too.

Kikizo: I want to ask about John Romero [an id co-founder] - I believe his departure from id was amicable, but do you know what he's up to today and might you work with him again in future?

Todd: I don't really foresee us working with John, because we sort of did that already and that's past history. The last I heard about Mr Romero is that he had started a new company in San Francisco and that he was working on an MMO game.

Kikizo: What will the trend in gaming be for the next ten years?

Todd: I still believe that the industry over the next ten years is going to be driven primarily by technology, and I think that it has been since its existence over 25 years or however long you want to say it's been around. The chief innovations have been enabled by the rapid pace of technological progress on the hardware, and then by what engineers like John and others have been able to do on the software side. And I think that is the enabling factor that allows us to do all these things like a higher art form so you're not just moving white blocks around a screen or chasing dots through a maze. All that stuff is fun, but when you talk about emotional aspects of games, or better storytelling, or more interactivity in the environments, just more visual richness, all these things are constraints put on the industry that we work within. So I do see the future being driven by what the pace of technological change is, and when John talks about that stuff - and he's been right for fifteen years so I'm not going to swim against him on stuff like this - when you see what he's done here at the texture level, and being able to make the perfect level - glorious, unique, huge, vast and at the same time incredibly detailed - and then when he talks about the next horizon is geometry, I think you start to talk about things that you've really only been able to do with massive offline render farms, being able to be done and realised in real time. What sort of characters, worlds and interactivity you can develop, is being driven primarily by what technology enables. So it's a technical question, but I think ultimately the answer is that the industry will be driven by that. It will allow the artistic side of the industry to shine through.

Todd and Matt, thanks for your time.

The 2008 Chevrolet Corvette Coupe to be given away will be Jetstream Blue, a new color introduced in 2008, with 3LT trim and a Z51 performance package. The car will be on display in the main exhibition area.

id Software Working on New Multiplatform Tilte?
With E3 around the corner we can expect many new announcements to be made, one apparently coming from id Software according to recent reports. Giving credence to this rumor is an updated jobs page on id Software's website where the DOOM/Quake powerhouse is looking for new designers, artists and programmers with PS3, Xbox 360, and PC experience, for a new, yet unannounced project.

Nope it was not, Robobliz was the first UE3 game.

i think what he meant was that Rage will be the first game released with idtech5. i'm sure they are letting others get started with it.

Right. You are judging the entire game because you saw A FEW scanned images from a magazine...... OK...

I can't supply a reference, but I'm sure that in one of the recent Carmack interviews he comments on how Raven's codebase diverged from the Doom3 code long ago and has morphed into it's own unique entity.

only thing I remember about the engine & raven was that JC was very upset Raven ditched D3 physics & implemented Havok, thus creating a rule that when you license an engine you can't replace parts you don't like.

*cough* http://i36.tinypic.com/116ner6.jpg *cough*

Das Uber Soldat

Holy crap, this is such a turn off. I think I even see a publically available texture in there (I used it on the D3CDiT project).

@qwertz123

whaaaaaa??????? what planet are you from?

(not that I don't see what you mean; the player models are not exactly what you'd call "next-gen")

Thank God that Gameplay > Graphics

Shack's Interview is up:
http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=917

BTW,those model on RTCW2 looks kinda ,you know what i mean.Hope they will work on it.

Holy crap, this is such a turn off. I think I even see a publically available texture in there (I used it on the D3CDiT project).

Aren't they supposed to be using Megatexture? If they're using that then shouldn't everything in there be unique?

Two new scan:
http://i38.tinypic.com/2rnvjhc.jpg
http://i34.tinypic.com/27ydh1l.jpg

These looks good though.Plus looks like the physics engine is indeed Havok's engine.

idTech4 megaTexture is typically only for terrain textures. i'm guessing we'll see some nice outdoor vista shots as well.



oh no! more burn-away bodies ala doom3 and quake4

I think that's just the effect of the weapon. The more read about the specifics in Wolfenstein, it begins to sound a bit more interesting.

It's not idtech 5, I have it on good authority that no one is allowed access to that until id have Rage out.

What?! Are you saying that id software is actually blocking other companies from licensing their technology? Why would they shoot themselves in the foot like that? I thought part of the point of idTech 5 was better tools for licensing? Why would Todd H. make such a big point of idTech 5's potential while "no one is allowed access"?

For the record, Doom 3 was licensed before the game game out. Epic regularly licenses their technology to others before the actual games they were designed for are released (BioShock not only was licensed, but was actually released before Unreal Tournament 3!). I find it absurd that id would do something so ridiculous, sacrificing profit just so they could have the only game that looks like theirs for a few months or so.

Perhaps idTech5 wasn't fully developed when Wolfenstein started production.

Epic regularly licenses their technology to others before the actual games they were designed for are released (BioShock not only was licensed, but was actually released before Unreal Tournament 3!)

Gears of War was the first Unreal Engine 3 game anyway....