Carmack: 'Pressure... To Do Something Different' Led To RAGE

Author: by Chris Remo, Staff

Talking as part of an in-depth Gamasutra interview, id Software legend John Carmack has been discussing new IP Rage, suggesting the firm created it in part to counter community sterotypes of id games such as: "It's too dark! It's too cramped! It's all indoors!" In the interview, conducted immediately after id announced a publishing deal with EA Partners for their new first-person, post-apocalyptic driver/shooter, Carmack explained some of the thinking behind the new IP: "Certainly we have our marquee titles, with Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake; and Doom really is the big gun out of that, the one that everybody remembers. 'That's the game I played in college!' We certainly expect to carry on with that, but there is a sense that in the community at large, if we were doing a Quake 5, Doom 4, Wolfenstein 4, just running all of that... "Even if people love it, and you can make - as EA has shown, you can run the sports titles every year, and people will love it; and, as Activision is showing, you can sell Call of Duty every year, and people will love it. "We did feel some pressure to try and strike out, and do something different. And there are certain things that we've always been dinged on, in the community, about our games. Some of which were to some degree intentional, but people talk about, 'It's too dark! It's too cramped! It's all indoors!' You know, the prototypical corridor shooter, and we did want to branch out from that. "I mean, there are still great things you can do inside any given niche like that, but we wanted to really strongly address some of those things. It's a bright, outdoor, post-apocalyptic desert world. It's a lot of the things that, while still a technological showpiece, in many ways, it's not limited in the way that Doom 3 was. "It's going to hopefully be a broader appeal to the game, with not so much the, 'Be scared out of your wits while you're running around tense," all bunched up, playing the game. It should be a more fun experience in a lot of ways; and we wanted to consciously address some of these things." Later in the interview, Carmack addressed exactly this issue in creating new IP that deviated from what id was known for, noting: "I mean, the first game [we worked on in creating new IP], that we rebooted, was called Darkness. And I was thinking, 'This is just going to be another thing that people hate us for - the exact same things...' So we're going to go ahead and do the 'running over mutants in a pickup truck' sorta thing, in the outside." The id co-founder concluded of the new IP, which does not yet have a concrete release date: "We went into this knowing that we had the humility to say, 'We're great at what we do, and we're all smart, and we're all talented; we can learn these other things, but we don't know it yet.' And we have to go in with this 'freedom to fail' sort of approach. We're going to go take some cuts at it, we don't expect it to be right first, and we'll work on it as long as it takes." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including more on the game's move to a primary console focus, the broader philosophy that lead to the development of the title, and the future of the company itself.