Q&A: id Software's technical guru explains shock
buyout by Bethesda parent, talks about new project, and doubts the
Mac-maker will enter the console wars; new wave of iPhone games
explained in detail.
Before the global news apple cart was upended by the tragic death of pop icon Michael Jackson, the biggest shocker of the week (for gamers) was ZeniMax Media's acquisition of id Software.
After years of being courted by the biggest publishers in the business,
the iconic Texan studio surprised the industry by selling out to the
corporate parent of Bethesda Softworks, developer of The Elder Scrolls
series and last year's smash hit, Fallout 3.
The move was quite a coup for ZeniMax. Though it has a long-term development deal with Splash Damage
and will publish Wet and Rogue Warrior via its Bethesda label, the
privately held media company became a first-person powerhouse
overnight. It now owns three of the most storied shooter
franchises--Wolfenstein, Quake, and Doom--as well as Rage, the
forthcoming driving and shooting action hybrid, which Electronic Arts
will publish under its EA Partners program next year.
After Rage, ZeniMax will publish all future id Software titles,
including Doom 4 and a third mystery title. (See below.) But as John
Carmack sees it, it's not ZeniMax publishing the games--it's id. The
technical guru sat down with GameSpot to explain in detail why id,
which has been a beacon of independent development since its foundation
in 1991, would sell out now. In fact, Carmack doesn't see it as selling
out, but buying into an organization where id will be more of a partner
than a subsidiary. He also discussed his feelings on developing new
projects, Apple and his iPhone projects, and Microsoft's
controller-less motion-sensing camera, Project Natal.
THE BUYOUT
GameSpot: id has been proudly independent for 18 years. Why sell out now?
John Carmack: Well, certainly things have been evolving in the
landscape of video games over the last 15 to 20 years. There was
certainly a lot to be said for the early days when you have six or
eight guys working in a lake house making a video game that's going to
go on and make an impact. But that's just not the reality of the
situation today if you want to be making AAA cross platform titles. It
takes tens of millions of dollars and lots and lots of people and many
years to go through all of this. And we were managing all those
processes fine. Maybe we had some strategic changes in our direction,
knowing that we need to spread our risk across a couple projects, which
is why we bulked up our internal staff for Doom 4 and Rage.
But the reason we were making these decisions is because we were an
independent company. Successful, sure, but still small compared to a
lot of companies we are working with around here. And we've been doing
smaller projects, like mobile projects and Quake Live, as we go through our development cycle on the big projects.
The plan of record had been we were going to take Doom 4 to a pretty
good level of development--a kind of vertical slice--before we even
presented it to publishers. That was with the expectation that we would
be signing a publishing deal next year--kind of like we did with Rage,
where we put a couple years into it ourselves before we were even
talking with publishers about it. That worked out really well for us in
terms of the deals we were able to cut. | 
