Catching up with id Software

Posted by Victor Godinez

2:37 AM, January 13, 2007

There are probably only two Emmy award statues in all of Mesquite, and they both belong to id Software.

Earlier this week, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences handed out several Technology Emmy Awards to some of the most well-known companies in the gaming industry.

Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony all garnered shiny trophies, as did id, the firm that essentially created the first-person shooter.

One award went to John Carmack, co-founder, technical director and all-around big brain at id Software, for his work on Doom, while the company overall won another Emmy for the technology in Quake.

The folks at id have won a lot of accolades over the years, but Todd Hollenshead, id’s chief executive officer, said the Emmy awards emphasize just how mainstream gaming has become.

“It’s certainly a very cool thing,” he said.

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But don’t think of this as some sort of lifetime achievement award, with all the programmers and artists and animators and designers at id suddenly calling it a career.

Instead, id is hard at work on a new game, a title completely independent of the famous Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein franchises.

Id’s not ready to unveil the new game, or even give gamers a sneak peek.

“We don’t like to talk about ideas in the absence of something to demonstrate what those ideas are from a visual standpoint, and it can take a while, especially when you’re innovating on the visual side, to get something that you feel is representative of the technology,” Mr. Hollenshead said.

In other words, they don’t want to talk about amazing graphics.

They want to show them.

But while id chisels away at its next creation, the company is keeping an eye on the rest of the industry.

Here are some of Mr. Hollenshead’s thoughts on…

The downsizing of the Electronics Entertainment Expo – “I understand the rationale behind the decision there, that there had just become an arms race of spending at the show. That may be a valid point. I’m not convinced it’s correct, however. I do think the E3 show focused the attention of the national and international media. It was the one time of the year that the games industry was in the spotlight for everyone to look at. It’s hard to put a price tag on the exposure that brings to the industry. But they did put a price tag on it and said, ‘It’s too expensive.’”

Why you won’t see an id Software game for the Nintendo Wii anytime soon – “The technology direction for our next game internally is one that, because of the limitations of the horsepower of the Wii, is something that we don’t believe we can port to it as a platform. But that doesn’t mean we don’t like the Wii. I want to get one. I’m supply shortaged out on the PS3 and the Wii, just like everyone else is. I have a 360.”
doom 3.jpg
Why id’s upcoming games will probably sell better on the PS3 and 360 than on the PC – “If I were just going to look at tea leaves, I believe on our internal project, we’ll probably outsell the PC amongst the two console SKUs. In fact, I think there’s a strong likelihood of that happening.” Mr. Hollenshead said that Doom 3 was the company’s best selling game of all time, and sales were almost evenly split between the PC version and the Xbox version. He originally expected the PC version to outsell its console counterpart by as much as 40 percent. So expect id to release PC and console versions of its games simultaneously from now on.

Why it will be hard for another online role-playing game to copy the success of World of Warcraft, which now has more than eight million subscribers – “I just think that primarily amongst MMORPG players it becomes or approaches a zero sum game. [P]layers who like those types of games only have time for one game.”