How does id see itself now? Is it a licensor of IPs and engines, or a game developer first and foremost?

TH: Game developer, absolutely.

But so many of your IPs are worked on externally nowadays…

TH: Yeah, well, we’re sort of in a transition on that. That’s coming back the other way now. We don’t make press releases about this kind of thing because we think our company strategy isn’t really newsworthy for fans. We’re not trying to inflate our stock price or anything. But we have the team that’s working on Rage, the next Doom game is already being developed at id and Quake Live is being developed internally as well. Wolfenstein is being developed by Raven, but our experience is that we do a better job of controlling the problematic issues that relate to the quality of the games if we have them under our roof and under our control.


Tim Willits

TW: The company is still very small. We’re 60 people now – which is huge for us. But during development of Doom 3 the company was 26 or 27. So we try and keep it small; we don’t have a licensing department because we want to focus on making the games.

How do you think the PC platform is looking?

TH: The PC market has its challenges as an exclusive or primary platform. The consoles have taken things that were unique to the PC – online play and communities, things like that – and invaded that space. But if you step back, and look at The Sims or World Of WarCraft – these are big PC titles that sell tons of units.

But is there a plateau in hi-tech PC gaming?

TH: I don’t think so at all. If you told someone ten years ago the power we have today they would think that you had just granted them infinity, but the reality is that there’s no such thing. We’ll use as much power as we can get and the games will be the better for it. What drives the games industry is innovation, not just in game design but technological innovation on both the hardware and software side.



The two games you mention as huge PC titles are both really scaleable. Do you think there are enough people playing high-spec games on PCs?

TH: I hope so. Rage will probably have the deepest penetration relative to what we’ve done in the past. Relative to a lo-spec game? Well, I wouldn’t call Rage that!