id's Tim Willits

[Laughs.] Oh yeah, that's right, yes. I'll get my ass kicked on the way home. But I'll tell you something: the reason that the Zenimax/Bethesda/id family thing works is now that we have fully staffed up our Doom 4 group, those guys are working on id Tech 5, they're learned from our mistakes, they're using our methods and because as you develop a new technology in a game, the first half of what you do always gets tossed out. Because technology changes and you don't know what you're doing at first, so in the past when we were 30 guys it would be okay to spend four or five years making a game.

So we did that, and we helped the other companies, and got a couple of engine licenses, and it was great. But as team sizes have changed and expectations have changed, we could not have followed that paradigm forever. We had to do something. So now that we have the multiple teams, the new technology, we'll get a faster turnaround for id Software. Which is really gonna be great.

Historically, there are many times when we would ask John Carmack for something that would be something like "you know, we should add this because licensees could use it." And he'd be like "are you using it for your game?" "No." "Then I'm not adding it in." So the attitude hasn't changed all that much honestly, because we as a company never set out to be the engine licensing mega-corporation. We never had a dedicated team; we never had a single employee that was just hired to help licensees. That was never what John wanted to do.

I mean, it's cool that some of our technology is in some of the biggest games – like Call of Duty still uses id Tech, y'know. They added a lot onto it, they called it something different, but at the core… Like in Modern Warfare 2, when you turn on the splash screen at the bottom and it says 'id technology'… [Beams]. So our technology has been great, but it makes life way easier just to focus on games, make our own games. Easier.

No. I mean it's… well, it was never really that big a part of our revenue.

That is true. The business folks really were looking at the id deal, the Zenimax thing and saying "what's John going to do, is John going to make rockets now?", but he is so happy, believe me, just working on stuff and programming away. You can definitely tell there's… a sort of peace in his mind and now he can just focus on making cool stuff.

Definitely. Heck, we don't need another Romero. In general, myself and John Carmack, we get way more credit than we deserve. That is true. Because we have some of the best guys, super-talented, and I would love to bring everyone here so you could talk to everybody. It's a bit unfair for the guys who sit back at work and think "oh, Tim's in Germany, Tim's in France, and this article's got a picture of Tim on it… What does Tim do? I'm the one here making particles, I'm the one here making this model and stuff, and everyone talks about the big giant mutant at the end of demo, but I'm the one who made that big giant mutant." For me, and I know John feels this way, it's got to be 'id', because we don't need any egomania.

John's more involved in the game design than most people think. His big thing has always been feedback, clear decisions, he helps out with even the story stuff. Early on, I was in draft for scripts and story, high level concepts, and John's been involved. But he doesn't get himself bogged down in business stuff. Does that answer your question?

Again, I've been with John at id since 1995. I know other people love to say that it's all technology and Carmack is king and we have to do what he says, but even back then, there were things that we would ask him to change and adjust. Heck, his to-do list is stuff that we ask for. I think most people think that he does stuff and we just make a game around it. After we finished Doom 3, he had an idea for the megatexture, he was starting to work towards it – there was some stuff that we used in Enemy Territory, and we actually started another game that was going to be new IP, and was going to follow the more traditional paradigm of id games.

But then John worked on a prototype of virtualising the textures, he downloaded all this geographic terrain date from NASA and was showing us moving through this world. And we were like "ooh, we could make a game with that, we can have cars and stuff." So Rage was kind of born of that integration, and from that point on it was "what do we need here, what we do need there." John does the basically kind of rendering and really low-level stuff, but we have totally other programmers that do code and vehicle code. That's not core Carmack.