Creative Minds: Todd Hollenshead

There's no doubt about it; id Software has been responsible for helping shape the games industry into what it is today. Without Doom, Quake and John Carmack's coding wizardry, you can bet we'd be playing very different games today. Who knows, the Russians might've even won the Cold War?

Doom has stuck in the minds of a generation of gamers, while Enemy Territory rocks the online charts and Quake III Arena is still played (mainly by us) after almost ten years on the shelves.

Meanwhile the next shooter from the FPS juggernaut, Rage, is exciting enough on its own. But behind the scenes the latest engine from coding super-brain John Carmack, id Tech 5, could flip current-gen game developer on its side.

The team is developing Rage for Xbox 360, PS3, PC and Mac simultaneously thanks to its latest engine, which works across all platforms using the same assets. If you're a developer (and tired of rubbish ports), you should be intrigued.

We sat down with id CEO Todd Hollenshead and lead level designer Matt Hooper to discuss the rise and rise of id.

What's a day's work like at id? We're imagining Quad Damage door bells and a flaming reception...

Hollenshead: Some days are better than others but almost every day is an interesting day. Some days we come into the office and check the video logs of the parking garage.

We see people fornicating in the forest, thinking there's no video cameras on the back of building, watching. Not id employees, just like people from the apartments across the fence from id.

Hooper: I think the biggest surprise for me when I joined was just how hard everybody works. We've changed a bit over the years but it's still a neat place to work and everybody has a lot of fun.

Hollenshead: I think you can still be who you are and do what you do, as long as you don't go on the internet and taunt other companies (laughs).

We tried to shut that down, there's nothing really positive that comes out of that. We can taunt each other though!

We're just a normal work. People come in, work, go have lunch, work a little more and then go home. Then if we're trying to get something done on Enemy Territory maybe we'll get in a little earlier and test that, have meetings, order lunch, curse Activision, curse insert-company-name-here...

Hooper: While we've been testing the cars in Rage we actually bought a trophy called the Rage Cup. We give people 24 hours to set the best time. Carmack's in there trying to get the best time, everybody's in there.

Hollenshead: When you make something a competition you very quickly flush out what sucks about it. Of course if you're not winning everything sucks, but if you're in the middle of the pack and some physics oddity happens you're like, "god damn it programmers!"

So your latest engine id Tech 5 is designed to fit on all current-gen platforms simultaneously...

Hollenshead: Yeah. The artists just make art and the assets on PC, 360 and PS3 are the exact same assets, it's completely platform agnostic. Every triangle, every pixel is identical.

I don't know if we hold all the keys, because it's not designed to be a 'solve all problems for game developers' engine. But I think compared to id engines historically it has more elements in it.

There's indoor stuff and outdoor stuff, because Doom 3 had an amazing indoor renderer but it really wasn't that great on outdoors. Id Tech 5 has both solutions, a good physics model, all the AI and it runs on PS3, PC, Mac and 360.

Hooper: Cross-platform means giving your game to another company sometimes or hiring another developer to get it to work. Id Tech 5 solves a lot of problems for our licensees but its all born out of our internal needs and what we wanted to do with Rage.

Hollenshead: We wanted a game that was multiplatform simultaneous that we could develop at id. We didn't want to send it over to someone else like we had to do with Doom 3. Vicarious Visions did a great job on it but Doom 3 on the Xbox is not the same as Doom 3 on the PC and it came out eight months later.

Our goal with Rage was we want to be across PS3, 360 and PC - plus we added Mac later as one of the platforms - and we wanted them all to come out at the same time. We didn't want to like sixty people; we're still small at 35 people that are working on the development staff.

Was Rage something you had in mind when developing the engine or did the concept come after?

Hollenshead: We actually started working on another game and as the technical direction was made clear we decided to go in a different direction. We didn't design the game for Rage and then John Carmack worked on the technology to make it work.

John was working on some technology and we thought we had one direction we wanted to go in respect to a different game. But as technology evolved it basically got about a year into it and effectively we sad 'we're going to throw all that away and start a new project.'

Moving away from Rage, how has the development stance changed since the early days of Doom?

Hollenshead: I wasn't at id in the beginning but I know of Quake 2 the development team was 12 people. Now are art team is 11 people and we need to hire two more. So the entire development team on Quake 2 was smaller than the art staff on Rage so that changes a lot of different things in how you work with people.

Before there was John [Carmack], the owners, a couple of programmers, a couple of artists and everybody was talking to everybody. But now it's not really efficient. We've got set of responsibilities, so we've got a lead programmer, a lead designer, a lead artist and all that. We did require some structural changes in terms of how people line up, chain of command stuff and things like that.

The development cycle has increased significantly and we're probably a bit more business-y than we used to be, but when you're getting towards 40 employees and you anticipate getting over that ultimately it requires you to have some rules.

Like before we had no vacation policy; it was like, if you take off too much time you got your ass kicked out. Where as now we have approved vacations, somebody tracks all this stuff and there's a lot more administration stuff.

Hooper: On the content creation side we have a lot more artists. In the past we'd hire artists who had some technical knowledge so our tools weren't always necessarily for them. But now there's been a big shift where we actually have a tools guy and the focus is on getting these great tools, letting the artists use whatever they want to make great art.

In the past consoles had been a concern but now they're absolutely crucial. That's why we have a focus of having it up and running every day on all platforms to get that kind of instant feedback we've always done on the PC.

We've learnt those lessons and as the industry's grown we've kind of moved in that direction. The artists concentrate on great art, the designers do the design thing. Back in the day we had programmers doing art.

As a former PC centric developer, just how important are consoles to id's future?

Hollenshead: I think for what our strategy is... we still see the PC as an important platform otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here with all the stuff we have going on.

But we also see consoles as being equally as important, that's what our focus is with id Tech 5. Where as in the past we'd do the PC first and then maybe later on give the console version to somebody else to do, now they're all lined up equally at id.

It's not so much that the PC has gone down, but the console have gone up. Id Tech 5 gives us the ability to work on all of those SKUs and not have to farm those out to somebody else or not have to have a version of the SKUs that's not as good as the other ones.

Hooper: To have it running all the time on different platforms is a big deal. Even for Doom 3 Vicarious Visions did a really good job with it, but you're talking about a team of 50 to a hundred guys that had to make a new game out of it.

Now we don't have to worry about that. It actually gives us more freedom, it doesn't limit us. It takes that process that used to happen at the end of the game where artists re-do textures and designer re-design things and we just keep it up to date.

Fellow FPS monolith Valve designed its Source engine so that it was easy to port over its big catalogue of shooters. Is that something you guys are considering doing with your engine?

Hollenshead: Port the back catalogue to id Tech 5? No, that isn't something we've really talked about and it'd probably require a lot of effort to do. I would guess that we'll probably put our efforts into making something next.

Strategically I think when Valve has evolved their engine stuff, they've brought everything along with it. When John [Carmack] creates new technology, as opposed to bringing everything up to the new stuff he basically says, "delete" and starts new code.

He leaves enough of the old code to kind of scaffold the new code, but by the time he's done writing a new engine there isn't really any holdover code.

What about Quake III? As part of the Quake Zero announcement you said you were disappointed with the dwindling player base...

Hollenshead: On the Quake III player base we've actually been impressed with how vibrant its been. It's been over eight years since QIII Test came out and for pure deathmatch it's still the most popular game - and that doesn't even include the Game Spy stuff and people playing LAN.

Quake Zero is more of a testing of the continued popularity of Quake. It's about making it free for anybody to play so there's no penalty to go on and try and learn, finding out what we can do with that and growing the Quake universe.

We want to see the player base grow and that's a lot of what's behind Quake Zero. A lot of people play Quake 3 but there are a lot of more people out there that would play if it didn't cost any money to buy it. The Quake Zero approach is to have it readily available, focused more on the scoring element and instead of relying on a retail model see if we can support games with an advertising model. That's really where we're expecting all the revenue to come from; sponsorship, ad content and any support we can get there.

And it's also headed to Xbox Live Arcade. Was the response to Doom on Arcade anything to do with that decision?

Hollenshead: Doom XBLA has done huge for us. It really impressed us with the number of units its done and how popular its been. So yeah, that really gave us a lot of credibility with Microsoft to talk about, "hey we really want to do Quake and we think it's going to be a good idea."

We want to do some new stuff and they want to do some new stuff. To have Quake Arena Arcade that's all the fun of Quake III with some new stuff on XBLA is a cool thing to be working on and I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

The new things we're adding for Quake III on Xbox Live Arcade are gonna be cool. It's made for that platform.

Almost ten years on we're still playing it in the office. Are you getting into as much Quake-enduced swearing trouble as we are?

Hollenshead: We have something called the Guild Hall at the university in Dallas and they work with people who are aspiring to be in the game development industry.

This person who was like the representative to the game development community arranged a tour group to come to id and see us. Somebody probably told me that they were in that day but I didn't remember.

So in my office my main work machine faces the door but I have a separate test machine turned away from the door. So I'm turned around and we're playing Quake III and me and a few guys in the office are having this competition.

We were playing and these guys were going on their tour and my door was open. They come through and they're all standing behind me being real quiet because they think I'm in the middle of something and I start shouting, "bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!" Then I heard this cough and turn around to find fifteen people standing behind me.

Quake III gets a fair amount of cursing from me but on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars I cuss the bots out so often. The other day was we were doing a test match and everybody was playing on one server. What happened was everybody quit out to go and do something else and the game replaced them with bots.

So I started out the match with a bunch of other players and eventually I was friggin' slaughtering everybody, not realising that it was all against bots. I'm taunting people, like "I'm owning you guys!"

Activision has been acquiring (and merging -ed) everybody recently. Has it not approached you yet?

Hollenshead: They have approached us in the past and we politely declined on their offer. Activision has been a great company to work with. We're still in the exploratory phase of who we're going to work with on Rage, so we'll wait to see how all of that goes.

Andy Robinson