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What next for id?

They might just have started work on Doom 3, but already John Carmack is talking about what will come after that, and what might have been

id Software are still putting the finishing touches to their Quake 3 add-on pack "Quake 3 : Team Arena", while lead programmer John Carmack prepares the first stages of their next project - "Doom 3". The decision to build a new Doom only came after a heated argument amongst the design team though, with the infamously abrasive modeller Paul Steed paying the price when he was fired by two of the company's co-owners for voting the "wrong" way. In an interview with Voodoo Extreme, John Carmack talks about some of the other (far more interesting) concepts that he came up with before the decision was made to go with a third Doom game, including an idea he's mentioned several times before recently - creating cyberspace, as envisioned by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

"I do think the time is right to have FPS infrastructure transcend its market niche and become the general infrastructure that VRML and others always envisioned. That was one of my major pitches post-Q3, but it wasn't received with much enthusiasm - most of the people here are game guys, not infrastructure guys. I have also proposed two other games that were still first person action games, but with different enough play styles to stand apart from our previous work."

And then the rest of the company decided to make a third Doom game instead. Oh dear... On the bright side, John adds that "in the far distant future, when DOOM finally ships, we will certainly go through the whole debate again". Let's hope they don't just decide to take the easy way out and make Quake 4.