QuakeCon 2008 Press Conference Live Blog

We're in Dallas to see what id Software has to show off this year.

We're at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas, and id Software is holding its annual press conference at keynote at QuakeCon. We expect the boys from id to talk about their projects, including Rage, Wolfenstein, Quake Live, and maybe even some Doom IV. Last year, id used the conference to announce Rage and a movie treatment of Wolfenstein. What will this year hold? Refresh this page often, as we're in the front row.

6:03pm - This shindig was supposed to start at 6, but they just opened the doors, so the thousands of shooter faithful are now rushing in for the primo seats.

6:07pm - Since I'm in the front row I see the id guys milling nearby. CEO Todd Hollenshead just poked his head out from behind the curtain to check things out. John Carmack was here a minute ago talking to some people, but he has disappeared. I've heard that there's supposed to be some awesome new footage shown tonight.

First up is the press conference, then Carmack will give his annual stream-of-consciousness talk.

6:08pm - I exaggerated the attendance. There's easily hundreds of people in the room right now. The Bring-Your-Own-Computer LAN room has space for 3,000 computers, so there are easily thousands here at QuakeCon itself. This year seems a bit quieter than last; perhaps the economy is weighing down on QuakeCon?

6:11pm - Tom Petty music playing on the speakers. The stream of people entering has turned into a trickle, so hopefully this thing starts soon.

6:14pm - Franz Ferdinand now on the speakers. I'm sitting next to Sluggo from GameSpy, and his Guitar Hero skills are legendary. He won the Guitar Hero tournament here last year, but he says there are some kids here this year that are scary good. Terrifying thought.

6:15pm - It's starting. Todd just jumped on stage and welcomed us to QuakeCon. Hearty applause.

6:16pm - He's thanking sponsors, including the one giving away a $55,000 Corvette. Dontcha wish you were here, now?

6:17pm - Said that 1,800 computers in the BYOC room thus far, but keep in mind that this thing is just starting. There's still about 96 hours of QuakeCon to go.

6:18pm - Talk of free beer gets very hearty response. Now he's hyping them up for Quake Live. Looks like we've got our first game of the evening. He introduces "King of QuakeCon" Marty Stratton.

6:20pm - First things first, they're hyping up sponsor Ventrilo, which is the one giving away the 'Vette. They're handing out 250 raffle tickets fo rthe car. Drawing at 11pm on Saturday. You can get a raffle ticket by a finalist or winner in competition gameplay. And there are other ways to get a raffle ticket, like being a volunteer. And you have a random chance of getting a raffle ticket if they select your name at certain times of the day and you're there to hear it being called.

6:23pm - Marty now on stage. Quake Live time. Says everyone in attendance got a Quake Live beta key, but you can play it in the BYOC room. Just type quakelive.com in your browser to play it. This only works for those who are here, though, I believe. Who knows? Try it!

He shows off a trailer that ran on TV last week. It's Quake 3 in a browser, basically. But since it's web-based, there's a lot of community funcionality built in.

6:25pm - Marty just screwed up and fast-forwarded through their PowerPoint presentation. Everyone hollers when they see the Doom and Wolfenstein logos on screen!

6:26pm - He's talking about Quake Live, says the big thing is the interface. You access the game at quakelive.com, so you can play it almost anywhere. Says it's always up to date, free, and you don't need to install the latest maps or anything like that. I was talking to Todd this morning and he mentioned something like this; your user configurations follow you wherever you go. Just log in, and they're there.

6:28pm - Todd back on stage. Sounds like mobile gaming is up next. So Katherine Anna Kang, president of id Mobile, is on stage.

6:30pm - Footage of Wolfenstein RPG, a sort first-person RPG game that runs on cell phones. Says there's a special guest from Doom in Wolf RPG.

She's announcing their next game with a video. The Doom marine is grinning. Doom II RPG on mobile phones announced!

6:32pm - We're recording this conference, so you'll be able to see all this for yourself soon, too.

Todd back on stage; it's time to talk Wolfenstein. What timing! We just posted a first look preview about 30 minutes ago. Todd is pumping up the crowd, and there are some hardcore guys yelling their heads off.

6:34pm - He's showing off the brand new trailer. German accent is talking about controlling some incredible new power. Lots of occult signs. And Germans. Gunfire, explosions, guys in scary power armor, particle beams. You can see this trailer on IGN right now, too!

6:36pm - Release date is when it's done. Big surprise! He's listing off what they've talked about thus far (this is a really fast press conference) and someone yells Duke Nukem Forever. Laughter ensues.

6:38pm - Doom IV time! Says the world official announcement for the next Doom game is right here, right now! Doom logo on screen. Room is full of yelling. No details, "but there will be blood." Also guns. Someone yells flashlights and laughter ensues. Says there will be demons. As well as gibs. "It's going to be kick ass!"

Release date is when it's done. id is hiring for the team, too, so if you think that you've got what it takse, send them your resume.

6:39pm - Todd is bringing Carmack to the stage. Big applause.

6:40pm - The stream-of-consciousness spiel is starting, but he's beginning with Rage. "We have ab unch of new stuff that we're going to show here."

Trailer spooling up, now with EA logo. Buggy racing through desert scenes. Rundown bar. Guys with guns on screen. Mutants. This is the trailer they showed from E3, basically.

6:43pm - Correction, that was an extended trailer, with a lot of new stuff at the end, like a bunch of buggys making it look like car wars or something like that.

Carmack is talking about how Rage is a 60-hertz game, but Doom will be a 30-hertz rates. So even though both will use the new id Tech 5 engine, the Doom game will have a lot more stuff going on the screen.

6:45pm - He's talking about how id has grown and diversified over the past couple of years. They have a couple of big projects, but they also have some exciting smaller projects. Says these are exciting since they can take risks and experiment and have fun. He's mentioning how id started dabbling in mobile gaming. They've sold two million units. Says that each one gets better, as they learn how to exploit the systems better.

6:48pm - Says that some of their mobile games have fit into 300K, which is a crazy tiny small amount of space. That's basically the same size as a large jpeg image. But now they're bumping to 600K as a minimum to 2.5 megaybtes on the high end. But this sounds like a nice segway to a mobile phone that has a lot more storage...

6:50pm - Complaining how mobile gaming is brand driven due to the fact that the screens are so small you don't have any room to actually describe what your game is about.

But on the other hand, there's the iPhone and other high-end phones. Says he's saddened about not having an iPhone game out now. He's praising Apple, praising it for being a force on the mobile front. The nice thing about the iPhone is that you can sell your game with lots of glitz and text description. He likes the royalty rate from Apple: 70-percent for the developers.

Says the iPhone SDK is really great. He says the iPhone is equivalent to a Dreamcast in terms of graphics, but says that it's also close to a PS2 or Xbox. Though the graphics RAM might be an issue.

6:55pm - Says iPhone more powerful than DS and PSP put together. Also said they have two possible iPhone games in development. One would be a conventional mobile game, the other would be a graphical monster on the platform. However, id has so many projects right now that these iPhone games might not unfold.

6:57pm - Says its a rollercoaster ride with Apple, like how they're nice to him when they want him to show up at a keynote, but he'll criticize them and get the cold shoulder. But tonght he's been saying very kind things about Apple, though he says "Apple still doesn't really, deeply get games," but there are people trying over there.

6:58pm - Noted how there's a distinct lack of Nazis in Wolf RPG, because mobile carriers like T-Mobile are in Europe. But he hopes the iPhone will break the lock that the mobile giants have on what can and can't be done on their phones.

This is a classic Carmack talk. He just keeps rolling from one subject to another with little thought. Hollenshead just walked on stage to give him a chair and some cold bottlse of water, cause Carmack is really getting into this stuff.

7pm - Says iPhone will be signficant, but it won't take over the world. There won't be a billion iPhones out there, but there could be more people playing games on mobile phones than on all other platforms combined.

Now he's talking about Google's Android mobile OS, and what that could mean.

7:02pm - I had to answer an AIM from someone, and I've completely lost what he's talking about. Something about Doom RPG II.

Now he's moving onto Quake Live. Was called Quake Zero, like how he announced it last year, but while he was still talking some domain squatter bought the URL quakezero.com, so instead of paying "blackmail money" they just changed the name of the game to Quake Live.

They thought it would only take them 6 months; it's just web development, as they said. But their hubris got exposed, so they had to bring on more people and do a lot more work on it.

7:06pm - Talking about the community possibilities of Quake Live, ut it's still in an experimental phase. They're still not sure whether it's a good idea. Basically, if they build it, will gamers come? Will they get 50,000 players, 500,000 players, or 5 million players? But when they got 100,000 beta players who signed up, that made him feel better.

Says that Quake 3 is stil his favorite Quake game, cause it was the most "pure." It's just you and others in an area blasting each other. Modern games need to have a lot more to it.

7:11pm - Talks about in-game advertising and how it's not really the future of PC gaming, since it's not appropriate for a lot of games. But you can do ads in a Quake Live, since it's a sports-like contest. But if they do a Wolfenstein Live, how do you explain ads for modern products if you're shooting Nazis?

7:17pm - Now he's getting into the definition of fun and entertainment.

Says that they've dropped the idea of making another Quake project built on id Tech 5; they've instead decided to focus on Doom instead. That's not to say that they won't ever make a Quake game built on id Tech 5, but it's just not on the boards anymore.

7:19pm - Says that modern, big budget, multiplatform games cost $20 to $30 million to make. And publishers don't have interest right now for multiplayer-only games like Quake. So Quake Live will be Quake for this year.

7:22pm - The air conditioning in this room needs to get ratcheted up a notch. I'm amazed he's been talking nonstop with almost no break; he hasn't even touched the water that Todd gave him. He's been talking for almost 90 minutes.

7:24pm - He said that id supports the PC platform, but he thinks the era of them making big budget PC-only games is over.

Says by the time they ship Doom, the PC will be way ahead of the consoles, and the game will take advantage of that. Says the PC is strong because it's better integrated with the Web; browsing on a console "sucks." Keyboard/mouse is the best way to play a shooter (big applause). He's kinda bashing the Halo generation who grew up with shooters on a gamepad and think it's the best. Nope, he's saying mouse/keyboard, and he's giving really analytical reasons for it.

Says PC better at "information side of things."

7:27pm - Since it's based on a eight-year old game, Quake Live will run "really well" on almost anything.

7:28 pm - I think he just made a LOTR reference.

Now he's talking about the "big gun projects" where he spends the vast majority of his time. He talks about how he likes to lock himself in a hotel room for a week with a dev system and just come up with things. But he's been focusing a bit more on the big gun projects now.

He has spent "a few days" on forward looking research this year; he'd love to spend more, but he's got all these other projects.

7:33pm - Rage is taking up about 90-percent of his time.

7:34pm - It's sounding like they've got a large part of Rage done. He's mentioning a few major things that they're close to finishing up, but does this mean the game is almost in alpha? Could Rage make it out this year or early next.

7:36pm - Says they've worked on it for three years. They see the light at teh end of the tunnel, and the home stretch, but home stretch is crunch time. But doesn't want to be here two years from now still talking about Rage.

7:38pm - Now he's talking about Doom. Says they get a lot of resumes from very smart people who want to build new systems like AI, but they don't need them right now because they haven't come close to expoiting the technology they have now. But the gist of Doom is that they're going to have a lot more creative freedom on Doom, because the technology will not be much of a limit.

7:43pm - He's now talking about stuff that I can barely understand.

7:46pm - He's talking about programming styles and languages, and the challenges in them. Very kinda techy stuff.

7:49pm - Says they do have a plan for the next generation of technology. Basically the Xbox 720, PS4, and such.

He's enter speculation land, because the hardware they're thinking about does not exist right now. But they have hardware road maps so they have a good idea. They do think they will have a new graphics technology for id Tech 6.

Thinks it's a naive view that the PC will come back and knock off consoles, just as some in industry predict. But the PC will still be a player.

Praising Nintendo for kicking butt by going for the Wii instead of getting into a graphics arms war.

Thinks it would be great if current generation lasted twice as long as the last one. While eight-years would be nice, doesn't think it will happen as the big manufacturers once again try to one up one another with their next systems.

Likes the PowerPC architecture across all three consoles is a nice thing, but Cell complicates the issue a bit.

7:57pm - You know those scenes in Star Trek where they're doing the technobabble? We just had one. I sorta understood every third word he said, but I'm sure programmers will eagerly analyze every word he said. Like I said, you'll be able to watch this for yourself, since we're recording the keynote.

8pm - It's 8 pm, and the most interseting thing he's talking about is just how daunting the next generation is going to be. What happens when you have hundreds of processor cores? That will pose a massive challenge to programmers. Meanwhile, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, and these huge corporations are making "billion dollar bets" on this stuff that no one, including him, can fully comprehend.

8:04pm - Over an hour-and-a-half in, and now it's question time! First one about id not releasing an SDK for Quake Live. Carmack says the Quake 3 tools will work, but they could release an SDK in the future.

Question two: Why did id team with EA on Rage? Carmack says they didn't have a falling out with Activision. They're still working with Activision, but they shopped Rage to publishers three times. They talked to SEGA, THQ, EA, and Activision. And the third time they got a slightly better off from EA. Plus, Valve thinks highly of its EA partnership, which is something that id asked Valve about.

He says that the nice things about Activision and Blizzard merging is that it put EA on notice. There was some hubris there, and it nocked them down a notch. And there's every chance they might sign with Activision on Doom. id does game-by-game deals.

Question three: At what point of development of Quake did they realize they had a kick-ass masterpiece? Answer: One moment he remembers early on development. They had just brought in 3D models, he's on ledge looking down, and he's seeing a shambler walking by below. Something he had never seen in a game before; sense that creature was there; not just a cardboard cutout.

Question four: How do they manage the creative and not technical side of game development? Answer: Managing creative is a tough issue. "id Software rigthfully had a reputation of having a bunch of prima donas" So now they have a level of heirarchy. Used to be just owners and employees. But with Doom 3 they introduced department leads, like lead artist. And now they're more disciplined.

Question five: Video card question between ATI and Nvidia. Answer: All GPUs built for triangle rasterization. But nobody doing something that's really specific to a new technique, like voxel ray tracing. Would love to spend six months to learn how to write a hardware voxel ray tracer, but no one will do that because you have to build games on technology that you have today, not what might exist tomorrow.

Question six: Last year id released large chunk of library on Valve's Steam. Thoguhts on digital distribution and relationship with Valve? Answer: Happy that lots of old id games have new life. No plans to do a mainstream title on Steam. Thinks Apple leading the way with the Apps Store on iTunes. Would not be surprised if next generation of consoles don't have optical media; they just have broadband connections, though they probably will for backwards compatibility.

Big bet titles will still be fairly conventional, boxed goods.

Question seven: It's a megatexture question, which Carmack says it's pretty much done for id Tech 5.

9:18pm - Sorry about that, but Carmack went on for so long that the battery on my laptop died. He went on for another hour or so answering questions, some related to his aerospace work. You can watch the press conference and a large part of Carmack's keynote soon on IGN. Thanks for reading.