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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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.

Rage is due for release... when it's ready, obviously. Stay tuned for more coverage on all of id's upcoming projects.

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