All The Rage

Absolutely. It's huge investment in new technology, its taken us a long time to make the engine, we're definitely leveraging this technology of course with the next Doom game and hopefully with Rage 2 and some of our other titles, from a business standpoint, making a part two is always smart.

Well John loves making technology, let's be honest. If the company was focused on making as much money as we possibly could, we would have just made Doom games. We would still be using the Quake 3 engine, all the decisions we've made have been following our vision and doing what excites us. John has been there for 20 years, I've been there for 17 years, if we didn't love it we wouldn't stay this long. And we've always done things that excited us.

There's a lot. Even just releasing a game. When we released Quake, this is true, John was like "alright Tim, why don't you play it through one more time, that works, send!" And then we went home. Now it's a months long process, distribution and advertising and strategy guides, and market television. That was not the case, we just sent and went home.

The way that you just need to plan so far ahead, with other titles and making sure you have a good window, it's like releasing movies, and the tours the events and the hands on, the previews and the covers. It's much more complicated. No more send.

Yes, there's more competition, there's millions of people that play games, the market is huge, everything has to be organised, planned, otherwise you're just rolled over by the next big thing. Consoles, first you have to submit, and they have to make sure it works, can't we just patch that in later if it's broken?

Actually it's really exciting to take a finite closed system and develop something so awesome inside of it.

With Rage we were optimising the code and game at 60Hz, and we have the different cores, especially on the PS3, and the guys were taking sound threads - because there are 16 milliseconds in a frame, 60 frames in a second, so we have to do everything within those milliseconds, and we were moving threads. Like the sound thread from this frame can go on this core, and we can take the AI, and we add plus one millisecond.

It takes a heck of a lot of brain power to put all the pieces together to fit on this system to make it run so fast. It was a huge technical challenge that I think was very mentally stimulating for the big brain groups at id. So yes, it's different, the fact that the CPUs are not as fast as they used to be. But to do what we do, in that limited space was a big challenge.

I don't know anything about the next consoles, but I can definitely see a future where everything is like iTunes. Even Steam, Steam isn't a cloud base system, but it's awesome that you can go on any PC and have all your games. That's definitely the way of the future, I think.

We've grown, but we try to keep that small team spirit. Our immediate plans, of course, are some DLC for Rage, make sure there are no bugs that we have to patch in, and then help the Doom guys get that game done. And then hopefully Rage does well and we can do another one, but that's as far as we're looking.

It would be hard, it would be really hard. I just don't know if we could.