Format: 360, PC, PS3
Release: 2010
Publisher: EA
Developer: id Software 

Change is in the air. But you wouldn’t know it from id Software’s foyer. A large Doom logo in relief hangs over the reception desk, and a model of a spider demon is visible sitting in a storeroom behind. Large reproductions of magazine covers featuring Doom and Quake are arrayed along two walls and another features two large glass cabinets filled with the trophies won over the 18 years since the developer’s founding. And welcoming us with the strongest Texan drawl we’ve heard since we touched down (and a jumper featuring Pringle diamonds in twinkly thread) is ‘id mom’ Donna Jackson, who has been looking after her boys since she joined in January 1994. The surface of her reception desk is covered with photographs of their partners and children. One catches our eye: co-founder and technical director John Carmack behind the wheel of a Ferrari, with his young son in his own toy version in the foreground.

So maybe one change, then – id has long since grown up. Carmack’s wife is now expecting their second, and creative director Tim Willits has his own brood, too, and is fuming about a three-day power cut he’s just experienced at home, which not only exposed his family to the soupy Texan summer heat but killed off everything, including the coral, in his large fish tank. Nothing, he informs us, smells quite as bad as rotting coral.



And now another becomes apparent – id’s also been growing. Once famously anxious to keep its size down to a tight group of around 40, it’s now just over 100-strong. And it’s spilled out into two new areas of its glassily anonymous office building in the suburban sprawl of Mesquite. Downstairs, accessed via an internal staircase, is the large, open-plan space devoted to Doom 4, while across the hall is the Quake Live team, which has a long way to go before even halfway filling its allocated area. Scaling up is only a facet of a larger change, however. Id is no longer a single-game studio – it now has three major projects: Rage, Doom 4 and Quake Live.

But we’re here for Rage. And still the change keeps coming. It’s the first game to run on Carmack’s new engine, id Tech 5, it features driving and racing, and did you ever count on it featuring RPG elements that would bring to mind Fallout 3 and BioShock?

Moreover, Rage is the first new IP that id has created since Quake in 1996. And as Willits tells us as he kicks off his presentation, it’s the result of wanting to do something very different to the studio’s norms. “We really wanted to build on the foundation of what we do well – that’s the firstperson combat – but we wanted to expand it,” he says. “We wanted to make a richer story, a deeper world, we wanted to have other elements beside running and gunning. We wanted to have vehicle combat and racing. We have adventure elements and a much richer character base.”

Most immediately shocking, however, is the palette. The demo, running on a PC, opens in a rocky valley with blue skies above and reddish rock below – far from the dinginess of a traditional id shooter. You won’t be surprised to learn that Rage is set in a post-apocalyptic future, but the world hasn’t been victim to nuclear devastation. Instead, an asteroid has hit the Earth – but just before it did, the world’s governments convened to begin the Eden Project. Their intention was to bury Arks beneath the ground, stocked with supplies and cultural artefacts and a small number of people in order to kick-start society once the dust settled. Your character comes from such an Ark, but an earthquake has caused it to malfunction and you’ve emerged alone, years after you should have, into a world that has developed in ways the governments couldn’t have foreseen.