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标题: CES 2007: John Carmack And Todd Hollenshead Speak [打印本页]

作者: Edison 时间: 2007-1-11 11:59
标题: CES 2007: John Carmack And Todd Hollenshead Speak
ame Informer met with id Software’s John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead to talk about, well, a lot of things. In our hour-long talk, we talked about the state of PC gaming, QuakeCon and the pros and cons of developing for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. We’ve split the interview into two digestible chunks. Part one appears here today, and we’ll run the conclusion tomorrow. Enjoy.

Game Informer: First off, I just want to say congratulations on the awards. [John Carmack was just presented with a Technology Emmy award at CES for his work in 3D game engines, and id Software earned an Emmy for the company’s rendering work.]

John Carmack: It still seems kind of a bizarre thing. I mean, whenever you hear Emmys and Oscars and stuff, you think high fashion and Hollywood, and that is so not what I’m about at all. And being honored with that--it’s certainly one of the big-time honors that you’re not going to turn down or are not going to step away from--but I never would have expected to receive something like this.

GI: After Enemy Territories: Quake Wars ships with the highly modified Doom 3 engine and the MegaTexture sup
port, is it time for you guys to move on from that engine?

Carmack: Yes, the in-house development project that we’ve been working on is all new technology. It still has some roots in the Doom 3 technology, but almost everything is new in there. We’re still not talking about exactly what the project is, but it’s a new IP, it’s diverting a little bit from the standard id formula and it’s not just a first-person shooter. Technically, it’s build around an advancement over the MegaTexture technology from Quake Wars. Where that was applied just to the terrain, the version of the new technology applies it into everything, so we can have that level of rich detail on all the surfaces on the entire world. That’s the push that we’re making with graphics technology. The gameplay is somewhat different from anything that we’ve of done before. The company is pursuing Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake franchises with other partner developers and all, but we’re trying to develop a brand-new franchise with this new one. Hopefully, we’ll be talking about that sometime this year, and we’ll be able to go ahead and come out of our own little cone of silence about it.

GI: Do you think that’ll be at E3 or maybe the next QuakeCon?
Carmack: I would certainly expect by the next QuakeCon, but…when is E3 this year?

GI: July
Carmack: [pauses] I don’t know. That’s a toss-up. It kind of depends on what the business relationships and stuff are at that point.

GI: Are you planning on adopting DX10 for Quake Wars?

Carmack: Not for Quake Wars, for sure. It has come up as a question for our internal development projects, and we weren’t even expecting to ask that question. There’s no massive pull for me for DX10. It would be more a question of if we don’t think we’re going to get done until Vista is broadly adopted, it might just save us development and support things to say it’s a DX10 game--but there’s no huge thing where we’re dying to use any particular DX10 feature. It would just more be a question about practically, is the market there where we can write off everything else? Quake Wars is definitely not DX10.

GI: Since you’re moving ahead with the new technology within the Doom 3 engine, you’re not worried about adopting that for DX10?

Carmack: No, because the DX9 stuff—actually, DX9 is really quite a good API [application programming interface] level. Even with the D3D [Direct3D] side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I’m antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step--they’re not worried about breaking backwards compatibility--and it’s a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I’m doing on the 360, and it’s probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I’ve worked with.

GI: A lot of gamers are in the boat right now--and I’m in the boat as well--where they’re saving money to buy a new rig. I was at QuakeCon two years ago with my computer, and I was just slow. So I’ve been saving cash to buy a new rig to handle the next-gen of PC games. Quake Wars, Spore and Crysis are all coming out on the horizon, and there’s a big push for PC games this year. Do you think gamers should take the plunge now for DX10, or do you think they should wait and stick with DX9.

Carmack: I don’t think that there’s any huge need for people to jump right now. All the high-end video cards right now—video cards across the board—are great nowadays. This is not like it was years ago, where they’d say, “This one’s poison, stay away from this. You really need to go for this.” Both ATI and Nvidia are going a great job on the high end. Internally, we’re still using more Nvidia cards, but it’s not necessarily because we’ve done a careful analysis and we decided that they’re superior in some way. They have better OpenGL support, but they’re all good cards right now. Personally, I wouldn’t jump at something like DX10 right now. I would let things settle out a little bit and wait until there’s a really strong need for it. I doubt there’s going to be any radical, obvious sweet spot where it’s like, “Now is the time to go get things.” It’s fairly mature, the pace that things are going on, and I don’t expect there’s going to be any huge sea changes in the way things are moving.

GI: Is there anything in particular that you’d suggest if someone was going to be going out and buying a new computer right now that they should make sure they get in their new rig?

Carmack: You know, not really. I think that while there are still points of differentiation between the different qualities of things both in graphics and processor and all that, it’s hard to go wrong nowadays. The prices are so low relative to where things used to be and the performance is great. People can still screw up and buy a computer with no expandability or get stuck with some integrated graphics card on the motherboard or things like that, but it’s been a long time since we’ve cared enough about the exact performance stuff to go and make exhaustive benchmarks on all the different things that we’ve done. I mean, the latest Intel processors are really fast, and we do find them pretty much top of the line. Jan Paul has done a lot of benchmarking for various compression and decompression things, and it is kind of neat going around benchmarking on the 360 and the different Intel processors and comparing everything, and Intel’s done a really great job with the latest generation of things. It’s funny from my position, but I’m not all that deeply into the latest and greatest nitty-gritty details between the different things on there. Maybe with the length of perspective that I’ve had, it’s not all that incredibly important--especially when we’re looking at a four-year game-development title again. If I go and say, “Right now, this is absolutely the best thing, two years from now it’s not going to matter.” If I ever see anything where I think someone could make a really tragic mistake, like there was something out there that probably wouldn’t be a good thing to buy into, I would warn people off.

GI: What’s your take on Microsoft’s attempt to make Vista a more viable gaming platform?

Carmack: Microsoft has done a spectacular job on the 360 support. The PC, though, is fundamentally pretty different--with a variety of platforms and everything--and I don’t think Microsoft’s gaming initiatives…they’re able to really show their stuff on the 360 and make great value there. So obviously, we like the PC as a game-development platform and it’s still probably our favorite platform, but there are certain things I find more fun to do on the 360. We still very much like the PC, and most of that is due to Microsoft’s general support of making it reasonable to do that there. I’ve never been a big believer in cross-platform games, because there are too many compromises you need to make to design the game to be the same game play on both of them and have co-op play across them and all that. So, that’s not a major direction for me. Some of the tools that they wind up producing aren’t things that we adopt, but they are things that are important to some studios. So, I wouldn’t say Microsoft’s latest gaming initiatives on Vista have had a significant impact on id Software--and they might not even be the best use of Microsoft’s various resources--but they have so many resources they kind of scatter them around, and it’s not a horrible thing to do.

GI: What do you think about them trying to bring the Xbox Live platform to the PC space?

Carmack: Well, that’s been one of Microsoft’s big successes. They really did wind up hitting on a good set of things with Xbox Live. They probably surprised Sony with how a lot of the things are working out there, and we’ll probably wind up utilizing some of their technology on the PC space. People are expecting such richer and richer experiences with all of that now, where it’s becoming burdensome to continue to redevelop all of that sort of stuff, and the platform is possibly standardizing. It seems people are generally pretty happy with what they get with Live, and I don’t think it would be too big of a shame to make that sort of a standard interface across the board for the PC as well.

GI: Can you see them charging, like they do for Xbox Live, or do you think those are waters you don’t want to dip your toes into?

Carmack: I really haven’t even given it that much consideration. I think that they are providing a decent service for that. We’re very happy with our live downloads and stuff like that, and there’s value there, but I would expect that Microsoft would end up subsidizing that for their platform, but I don’t really know.

Todd Hollenshead: Didn’t AOL try that with a closed-content network that they charged a premium price for, and then ended up making it all free? That would be my kneejerk reaction. I think for games like Quake 3 or the multiplayer aspects of first-person games and those sorts of things, it’s going to be a hard sell to players who have had it free for over a decade now and now they’re going to be charged for it. If it’s a persistent type of game or a more persistent type of game…you know some of the things that we’re talking about like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, where it still is an instanced game. You don’t have levels or anything like that, but when you play you can actually--through experience points--get better abilities. But when you log off, your experience effectively goes away and you start again the next time you play at zero. Some of the sorts of things we have planned for the game is a persistence type of stat tracking, so that you can be on ladders and have skill points and these sorts of things that you really haven’t seen that much on the PC outside the MMO-type games but that you see with all of the achievements and ladders and things on the XLA side.

GI: We’ve heard mixed results from developers on developing for, or bringing their games over to, Vista. Some have loved it, and others have been lukewarm about it. What are your thoughts on Vista?

Carmack: We only have a couple of people running Vista at our company. It’s again, one of those things that there is no strong pull for us to go there. If anything, it’s going to be reluctantly like, “Well, a lot of the market is there, so we’ll move to Vista.” Other people that are running it are going, “It’s coming around, you’ve gotta run this. This is the greatest thing on here.”
Hollenshead: And it has posed some backwards-compatibility problems for us with Doom 3, Quake 4, Quake 3…

Carmack: Quake 3 is a problem on it?

Hollenshead: Well, it’s not that it’s a problem, but more of that we haven’t done much testing with it.

Carmack: I’m pretty sure (Quake) 1 through 3 work just fine.

Hollenshead: But yeah, there has been some level of concentrations, at least on my part. It’s like a whole new QA process. Publishers aren’t really used to having to fund that on a title like Doom 3, which a still a very significant selling title. But it’s one where Activision thought their support aspect of it was effectively dwindling down to zero. What we ended up doing right was basically doing it ourselves, because Activision didn’t want to do it. We had to go through a whole QA process with Doom 3, so we had to pull people off of the various things that they’re working on.

Carmack: It’s a tough thing for Microsoft, where, essentially, Windows XP was a just fine operating system. Before that, there were horrible problems with Windows. But once they got there, it did everything an operating system is supposed to do. Nothing is going to help a new game by going to a new operating system. There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there really aren’t any for Vista. They’re artificially doing that by tying DX10 so close it, which is really nothing about the OS. It’s a hardware-interface spec. It’s an artificial thing that they’re doing there. They’re really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it.

GI: At QuakeCon two years ago, you were very adamant during your keynote about not being too thrilled about developing for multi-core systems. Not just specifically with PCs, but also the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Now that you’ve been working with both of them since then, have your thoughts changed at all?

Carmack: Microsoft has made some pretty nice tools that show you what you can make on the Xbox 360. I get a nice multi-frame graph, and I can label everything across six threads and three cores. They are nice tools for doing all of that, but the fundamental problem is that it’s still hard to do. If you want to utilize all of that unused performance, it’s going to become more of a risk to you and bring pain and suffering to the programming side. It already tends to be a long pole in the tent for getting a game out of the door. It’s no help to developers to be adding all of this extra stuff where we can spend more effort on this. We’re going to be incentivized, obviously, to take advantage of the system, because everybody’s going to be doing that. It’s not like anyone’s going to say that it’s impossible to do. People tend to look at it from the up side. It gives you this many more flops and it gives you this much more power to do that. But you have to recognize that there is another edge to that sword, and you will suffer in some ways for dealing with this. I don’t have any expectation that anytime soon, a massive breakthrough will occur that will make parallel programming much easier. It’s been an active research project for many years. Better tools will help and somewhat better programming methodologies will help. One of the big problems with modern game development with CC++ languages is that your junior programmer who’s supposed to be over there working on how the pistol works can’t have one tiny little erase condition that interacts with the background thread doing something. I do sweat about the fragility of what we do with the large-scale software stuff with multiple programmers developing on things, and adding multi-core development makes it much scarier and much worse in that regard.

So we’re dealing with it, but it’s an aspect of the landscape that obviously would have been better if we would have been able to get more gigahertz in a processor core. But life didn’t turn out like that, and we have to just take the best advantage with it.

GI: You talked a lot about the Xbox 360. What are your thoughts on the PlayStation 3 now that you’ve had more time on it?

Carmack: We’ve got our PlayStation 3 dev kits, and we’ve got our code compiling on it. I do intend to do a simultaneous release on it. But the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony’s. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3. But we’re not going to do much until we’re at the point where we need to bring it up to spec on the PlayStation 3. We’ll probably do that two or three times during the major development schedule. It’s not something we’re going to try and keep in-step with us. None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but they’re not helpful to the developers. If they make the developers say that Sony is going to own the main marketplace, let’s make them develop toward this and build it this way, it would somewhat downplay the benefits of the Xbox 360 and play to the PlayStation 3’s strengths. I suspect they’re not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasn’t clear a year ago. A lot of people were thinking it’s going to be a rerun of the last generation, and it’s now looking like it might not be. I’ve been pulling for Microsoft, because I think they’ve done a better job for development support, and I think they have made somewhat smarter decisions on the platform. It’s not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, it’s not even that it’s ugly--they just took a design decision that wasn’t the best from a development standpoint.

GI: When you were talking about adding more resources into the parallel development, do you feel that goes against Microsoft’s XNA platform? Microsoft’s spiel was that you used to spend 80% on problems and 20% on creativity.

Carmack: Yeah, that’s all bull****. If anything, when you give processing power in a way that is not convenient on here, it can make you spend more effort. It can make you do greater things like with physics or accelerate audio or something, but it’s not like that you have this hardware that takes whatever work you were doing and makes it into less work. And this had analogs through all kinds of parallel processing on there. It’s very rare that you have a piece of hardware that can make what you were doing easier. Usually, you have to spend more effort, but you get something vastly more powerful in the end. Even 3D graphics was kind of like that--especially a lot of the early cards. They were a decelerator, people used to joke. If you ran a game that had a really good software rasterizer, like Quake, and you chose to run that through most of the early 3D cards, it actually got slower. But then you could say: “Oh, you can run at a higher resolution and you can get filtering.” But it was still not making what you were doing go faster. So you had to go put in all of this other work to try and bring the speed back and also get these other advantages. The same type of thing was true with sound accelerators, and we still deal with EAX and stuff, but it’s not a high-return platform. And people are dealing with that with the standalone physics accelerator. I don’t think a physics accelerator alone will ever be a big thing. If anything, it will be technology rolled into something else.

So with all of the extra power, we’re going to be able to do some cool things with it, but by no means will it make our lives easier. Now it will be more like, “Hey audio guy, you no longer have to live in 10%. This core is all you. Have a blast.” That type of thing will make life easier, but it’s not the most efficient use of resources.

GI: We’re talking about the high end. Going to the other side, you’ve gone back and programmed for simpler systems, like cell phones. On the console side, the Wii is the most underpowered, as they say. What do you think about developing for the Wii?
Carmack: You know, we’ve never had a good relationship with Nintendo, from really early products we did a long time ago. And for the most part, we just said, “Fine.” We’re busy with other stuff, and we just haven’t been that tight with Nintendo. On the up side, I really do respect what they’re doing, where for years, I’ve been saying—you probably heard me at QuakeCon—I will go on about how IO devices are where the really big differences are going to be made in gaming. You can get ten times the graphics power, and you can make a prettier picture, but when somebody makes a new IO device that really changes the way that people interact with the game, that’s going to have a larger benefit there. So I’m really pleased with what they’re doing with the Wii and with the DS—and they’re doing innovative things. But our current generation of game technology is not targeted at the Wii. Maybe that was a mistake on our part originally, but we have been looking strictly at the 360, PS3 and PC as what we want to simultaneously develop on. We probably aren’t going to be able to hit the Wii with the same technology platform.

GI: What are your thoughts on episodic gaming?

Carmack: You know, it’s one of those things that sounds like a good idea initially, but I’m not sure that—it’ll probably have some degree of success—but I don’t think it’s necessarily a method that’s going to cover the majority of the gaming market right now. I think it does tend to feel a little bit—it’s all in market psychology and all of that, and I won’t claim to be any kind of an expert on that there. It would be nice if games could be developed more piecemeal like that, but it still is so heavily front-loaded to build your basic core on there. It would be great if you could go ahead and release episodes regularly after that, but I think the customers feel to some degree that if they buy a game and they can get episodic additions to it, that there’s this sense of, “Why didn’t they just put that on there when I bought the main game itself?” I think there are some barriers to overcome. It would be nice when Internet distribution does become the main way that people get their games and you can just continue carrying out additional upgrades as long as you’ve got enough people willing to buy them. I think that would be good for game-development studios. But, so far, nothing’s come along that really satisfies the same thing as the blockbuster commercial release. Of course, it’s a tough market, with winners and losers, but even if you’re in the winner’s slot, that’s still where the big successes are. But I do think it’s possible for a lot of the less-conventional marketing strategies to get to a lot of game studios. There’s probably a lot of good business there, but it’s not the same thing as if you’ve got the possibility of doing a triple A title, there’s nothing that’s currently drawing you away from that.

Hollenshead: If you’re doing a triple A title, I think there are substantive reasons as to why you would choose to go that direction. I mean, the first thing, as John said, is that the costs are front-loaded in terms of time and the expenses, and basically the game has to be done, especially from a programming standpoint, by the time you release the first episode. You can add some features as you go along, but the fundamental aspects of what you’re going to be able to do from a significant level are going to have to be done. You incur all the time and expense to create that, and typically the media creation is not something that’s gating you for release anyway. So, there’s a bit of out-of-sync between how you incur time and cost and how you would actually recoup that through sales. Plus, there’s the way that the market is set up and the way consumer expectations are set, certainly, publishers’ market games are for games with a large launch with maybe some potential upside. You saw a game like Battlefield: 1942 that had a big launch, but then when it caught on it still had a crescendo of support. Typically, the game-sales curve is that you have your biggest month in your launch month, and it decays from there as retailers devote less and less shelf space to it, publishers devote less and less marketing dollars to promoting it and those sorts of things. So, talking about a long-term cycle of continuing to have to support that from a retail channel of support and a marketing dollar channel of support—it’s very difficult for the market to understand how exactly that’s going to work.

Carmack: Obviously, the retail chain’s going to hate it.

Hollenshead: They’re not going to like it, because you have effectively one product that gets split into, let’s say, four boxes at lower price points, and that’s the exact opposite direction that retail wants to be in. If you’re talking about Internet distribution, there are issues there, but the main one is that even when you look at Half Life 2 and the episodic content, the biggest litmus test is taking a triple A title, where you have retail distribution and Internet distribution, and the choice that Valve made was to have both, which I think tells you that even with a company that’s extremely motivated—because they have their own proprietary distribution system—to go exclusively with that distribution system understands that from a market reality standpoint that if you want the big dollars, you’re going to have to be in retail stores, too, at this point in time.

Carmack: That is one of the interesting things about the cell-phone market, where instead of the fall off on sales curves like with PC titles, the cell-phone ones actually tend to grow with time as word-of-mouth gets around. And it’s an interesting different sales dynamic, and I do always hope for something that—it’s sort of a shame, where with a cell phone, most of the content comes over the air, which has this weird dynamic with the fact that memories are getting huge on the cell phones and you have a little straw to suck the content through, and that has its own set of issues. It has the potential there, where if people are always buying the games on there, where it should be this egalitarian system where you should be able to get any sort of content through there, but because of the way that it is tightly controlled by the providers on there—who are not exactly nimble, quick companies—and they have that aspect of that, dealing with the actual cell-phone companies does stink. It’s interesting to play around with different distribution strategies and technologies on something like that where you’re not talking about sinking thirty million dollars on development into something that you want to roll the dice on.

GI: Speaking of Valve, what’s your take on Steam?

Hollenshead: I think as far as an Internet-distribution methodology, that it’s probably the most effective right now. They’re not the only game in town anymore, there are competitors, and the issue for a developer like id is that if we use Steam then we have to bolt someone else’s distribution system onto our technology as opposed to if you’re a Source engine licensee or something, that all kind of comes pre-packaged. So, that would be an issue for us, but I think it’s a pretty big advantage for Valve to be able to have a second line of publishing for their own titles.

Carmack: Of course, it doesn’t help developers that much, because they take as big of a cut as a conventional publisher would.

Hollenshead: I’ve spoken to them about Steam and I’ve looked at it for our back catalog, and the royalty Valve was getting—and we have a publisher that still has distribution rights we’d have to share—and by the time we go through all of the royalties, you end up making less money distributing it over the Internet, which is the opposite of the way you think it should be. The story that Gabe [Newell] told at GDC, when he sort of introduced Steam as, “Here is your distribution platform of the future,” and all that—I don’t think Gabe intentionally misled anyone, but I was there, and I saw that there were serious flaws in the economic analysis that he laid out for developers. The problem for most developers is not one of not getting paid enough once the game is out, it’s that they don’t have the seed funding necessary to internally fund development of their titles. That’s why they work for publishers on milestone schedules and advances against future royalties, and Steam offers no solution for that. It also doesn’t offer any solution for the marketing spend question, where if developers don’t even have enough money to fund themselves internally to develop their product, then they’re not going to be able to pay for a multimillion dollar marketing campaign, which is a huge amount of risk that as an industry standpoint is offloaded from developers to publishers. A lot of the marketing spending goes in advance. They have their metrics about what game anticipation is and game rankings and a number of measures that they can use to gauge their marketing spends. Building the inventory and spending the marketing dollars, those are before you get a dollar of revenue, generally, and developers just can’t afford that, and Valve doesn’t have a seed-capital solution for that. So the issue is that if developers are beholden to publishers, which gives publishers more leverage in the business relationship, the problem with using Steam is that it would only make sense for a developer like id or Epic or Valve, who are completely internally self-funded. We don’t have that issue of not having leverage with publishers because we have to borrow their money to make our games or they have to pay us to make games for them. To me, that’s a bit of the catch-22. I think when you look at the access to a market, in terms of, “Hey, we have this game and we want to make it available to everyone who has Steam,” which is theoretically everyone who has bought Half Life a few years after it was out or Half Life 2 or a lot of these other titles, I think that they’ve created an asset that has significant value.

Carmack: It’s getting to be one of those things where in the long term it’s obvious that you’re going to be able to say, “I want to play this computer game,” you just click here on your computer and you get it. There’s no question that that is a powerful model that people are going to want to pursue, it’s just a question of how it works out in the next decade.

Hollenshead: Yeah, and you do see almost all of the publishers now are either working on their own internal solution or partnering with a retailer. There’s this whole crazy deal where publishers feel like it’s a bad idea to be in theoretical competition with their customers. Even though they have their own little Internet stores, they haven’t gone at being direct to the customer. For a developer like us, that’s never made any sense at all. If the market is more efficient to be more direct with your customer, then it seems to me that that’s what you should strive for. They have been paranoid about telling a retailer, “We want to sell you X hundred thousands of copies, and meanwhile we’re going to be doing our best to make sure that no one buys one because we’re selling them all through this sales-distribution avenue that you have no access to.” What I think we’re seeing is that EA is working with Valve and they’re working on their own solution, and Activision is working on their own solution, and all the publishers we’re talking to now, whether they’ve announced it or not, at least have some kind of plan—whether it’s in partnership with retail through some online distribution or whether they’re going to build something or license something—I think they all recognize that this is on the horizon. I think one of the worst business decisions that you can make is to fight an inevitable technology.

GI: This year’s QuakeCon is coming up…

Hollenshead: I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this or not, but the Anatole [the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas], that’s where QuakeCon is going to be for the next two years. We’ve entered a two-year deal with them. Last year’s QuakeCon, I think it ended up working out a whole lot better than I thought it was going to be, given the last-minute nature of the way things came together. The problem really was—and I think people always think there’s some kind of big conspiracy or something or incompetence—but we got the rug jerked under our feet from the Gaylord Texan, where we’d had it the previous two years. They told us they had a date saved for us and then, lo and behold, surprise, it came through some alleged scheduling snafu the dates weren’t going to work because they had someone coming in on a date that we absolutely had to have the space. I think we made the best out of an unpleasant situation, and it ended up being a lot of fun at the Anatole this year, and the guys there really appreciated the business. I don’t think the Gaylord Texan ever appreciated the QuakeCon crowd, and I really don’t like to apologize for our guys. We love the people who come out there, and they have their own thing. If you get 5,000 people together and expect that there are going to be no problems whatsoever, then you’re not in touch with reality. The Gaylord wanted the Red Boa ladies or whatever. I just use that as an example because it seems whenever I’m at that hotel they’re there. You know, it’s like women in their 50s and 60s and 70s and they go out for a week to get away from, I don’t know, their husbands, and they go out and party or go get as crazy as you can at that age. That’s the crowd that they wanted, which is different in lots of ways than the Quake crowd. I mean we advertise it as a party for the fans, and when you have college and that sort of demographic at an event, then you’re going to have a certain amount of zest for life that maybe at 70 years old you’re not going to appreciate.

Carmack: But realistically, we don’t have that many problems at QuakeCon. If it was a football convention or something, there would probably be a lot more incidents.

GI: I was there two years ago, and the later it got it got loud and I saw some crazy stuff, but I’ve seen worse at other places.

Hollenshead: It kind of comes down to, and this is sort of a silly example, the hotel freaked out because somebody smoked pot in the hotel. And I’m like, “If you’re freaking about somebody smoking pot in your hotel, then you haven’t been in the hotel business very long or you freak out way too easy.” What do you say? “I didn’t tell them it was OK, but it’s their room.” It’s like, “Yeah, well what else is new, and what do you want us to do about that?” It’s not something that we endorse, but at the same time we realize that it’s there. Our deal was that we police the convention center, and we did that. We told them that they needed to police the hotel, and they’re coming to us with issues like that. That’s on their side, and they needed to take care of those sorts of issues. This year’s QuakeCon is August 2-5. The Anatole worked out great. Where we had the BYOC [bring your own computer] and the vendor area is now all BYOC, and the room beside that, where we had the stage presentations, is now all going to become the vendor area. We’re changing the way it works, too. As opposed to having everybody who is a vendor being effectively a sponsor of the event, we’re basically going to the E3 or GDC methodology of booth space. You’ll get a space, like if it’s ten by ten, it’s $2,500 and it goes from there.

Carmack: So we won’t have someone from Intel bitching about having an AMD poster, and vice versa.

Hollenshead: We do want to have certain aspects of the event sponsored, for example a tournament sponsor. You don’t have to be an exhibitor to be a sponsor or vice versa. You can be one or the other or whatever it is that you want to do. We are making it more like—at least for the exhibitors, vendors and sponsors—a traditional trade show. Part of it is with changes to E3, we see an opportunity to raise the profile of the event and also, as John said, we’ve had issues in the past where if Nvidia has a partnership with AMD and we have Intel as a sponsor then Intel gets upset with AMD logos in the Nvidia booth. There’s gamesmanship that goes on amongst the sponsors, that if they didn’t get the exclusive, then they’re looking for a way to wedge in and get some display there. Then we get bitching from the other side, which is totally understandable. But it really does end up being like separating fighting siblings over things, and we’d rather not be babysitters about that stuff anymore.

GI: Are there any other plans for the event that you can share yet?

Hollenshead: I think most of the stuff we’ve talked about in the press releases is sort of where we’re going. QuakeCon is one of those things that when it gets to specifics, when we get more momentum on the event we actually plan that stuff. We’ll have the tournaments again, and expect the BYOC to be massively expanded. There’s an opportunity for the event to be the biggest that it’s ever been, and that would certainly be our hope. It may be even bigger, in terms of attendance, than we had at Gaylord. That’s going to be a challenge for us because, technically, it’s a little less total square footage space. We really do like the Anatole, and they were totally cool to everybody who came. Like on the croquet court. I think there’s a rule on it that says you can only wear white on it, but someone went to Wal-Mart and bought some of those giant-ass bouncy balls and then put numbers on them and they were playing human pool where you’d kick the ball and then put chairs on the side of the croquet court. The hotel was like, “OK, you can’t have the chairs out there,” because it’s basically like a golfing green and they don’t want the chairs tearing up the grass. Then they just had people out there spread their legs and if the ball went through, it formed a pocket. Stuff like that, they’re just totally cool. There was a report of damage, which the hotel didn’t freak out about, like an overhead lamp fixture got broken or something, and they came and said, “Well, we had this lamp that was broken because two people were out last night having a light-saber battle and they hit one.”

GI: Two more quick questions. Is there any game or tech that you’ve seen in the past year that’s made you say, “Wow”?

Carmack: I think Gears of War looks great. I really do. I think they did an excellent job with that. They did a lot of things really well. That’s the best-looking thing that I’ve seen in a while.

Hollenshead: The Crysis stuff looks pretty good, too. I don’t know if you’ve seen that.

Carmack: Yeah, that’s not a shipping product yet.

GI: Doom, starring the Rock. Any regrets?

Carmack: It’s obviously not an Oscar-worthy movie, but I had fun watching it. I saw it twice, and I thought it was pretty good. All I wanted it to be was not wretched. I didn’t want it to be Super Mario Brothers or Double Dragon—the really, really bad movies. And it came out and did pretty well, and I thought it was pretty good. So, no regrets.

Hollenshead: It was a tough thing, too, you know. The movie had been in some level of production across different license holders for years and years. Still, it was the first time we’d ever done anything like that, and a lot of the stuff was me working with people on stuff that I had absolutely no experience working on. I think you learn a lot in the process working on something like that. I think Hollywood is a bit voodooish and they keep very much, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” about how things work, and I guess that’s just sort of part of the mystique of it. Part of that is, “We’re spending all this money to make it,” and the studio takes the responsibility for, and takes control of as much responsibility, as they can get. I think we maybe let them have a little bit too much. There are some things that I would do a little differently, but I think the main thing is to get the people that really understand the game who are really interested in making the type of movie that is true to the game.

Carmack: My only regret is that they didn’t play up the satanic Hell aspect, that it just became a genetic mutation. I did want it to be more about evil, but I can understand why they cast it the way they did, and I think they did a decent job with it.

GI: Would you guys like to revisit Hollywood? Try it again?

Hollenshead: One of the things we’re working on now, although the rights are currently all back with us, with Wolfenstein in development there’s interest in a Wolfenstein movie. And Sony had the rights for a while and those recently expired and came back to us.

Carmack: And I would hope that at least the same thing doesn’t happen on there, where it doesn’t get turned into a traditional war movie. You have to have that aspect of the macabre and the supernatural to make it into something other than Brothers in Arms or whatever.

Hollenshead: It’s kind of an interesting process. You don’t want to stifle someone’s creativity so they have to make a movie that’s exactly the same thing as a video game, which I don’t think results in very good movies. At the same time, you want to put parameters in place so that you can’t do something that’s completely not in line, which makes sense. If they wanted to make a World War II movie, why did they pay id a license for Wolfenstein unless it’s just a way to monetize off the name. We try to put some criteria in to constrain them in some ways but allow them to be creative in others. If things work out right, in a lot of ways these things end up being totally dependant on the script and if you get a good script that works with the movie, if an actor reads it the director reads it and likes it, then you can get a good cast of talent together.

GI: Thanks for your time.

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