Interview: id Software's Todd Hollenshead

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.

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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!

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