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Eurogamer Expo Sessions: Tim Willits presents RAGE

id's creative director talks new IP, ideas in the bath.

Tom Bramwell avatar
Interview by Tom Bramwell Former Editor-in-Chief
Updated on
18 comments
Eurogamer That's the 360 for you. I expect we'll have quite a few PC people in the audience at the Eurogamer Expo, so I wanted to ask: do you invert the mouse in FPS games? Answer carefully.
Tim Willits

I do not! What I do is I tease the people at id Software who do invert the mouse for being Duke Nukem fans. Way back in the day when there was Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem, people who played Duke had it inverted because it was default, and we have a few people at id who used to work at 3D Realms too.

Eurogamer Surely that should be a prerequisite for moving to id - that you have to learn how to play without inversion.
Tim Willits

Exactly. You are right about that. John Carmack did not invent first-person shooters to be played inverted.

Eurogamer I firmly agree. So RAGE is the first new IP you've done in over 10 years. How do you start a new IP? What's the first step?
Tim Willits

Do you want the truth or the marketing spin?

Eurogamer Let's go with the truth.
Tim Willits

It's not actually as exciting as the marketing spin.

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Eurogamer Okay well if it sounds rubbish I'll delete that bit of the tape and we can do it again.
Tim Willits

So after Doom III we were working on another game which was also a new IP, but it was really following the id Software paradigm. It would have been great, but, nyah, it wouldn't have been anything that new or different.

So John [Carmack] was working on his virtual texturing system and he needed a ton of graphical landscape data, and, you know John, he went to NASA and they had tons of terrain data to download for free, so he did that and he was streaming this landscape, this huge megatexture, and I was watching it and thought, that's cool! We can add that into a game! We could have all these large outdoor areas that are all hand-painted and uniquely textured! And if we have outdoor areas we have to have cars. And if we have cars they have to have guns on them.

Eurogamer Obviously.
Tim Willits

Yes. But we also want to have muscle cars, because muscle cars are cool. But if you have muscle cars with guns then you start thinking the Road Warrior, post-apocalyptic... That'll work, because we also like to do sci-fi elements like BFGs, laser guns, etc. So if you want muscle cars with guns and sci-fi elements, you can only have one setting.

And yes we could have put it on an alien planet, but then all the effort of having people understand this alien planet and these alien people would have been way more work than it's worth. So that's how we came up with setting. Then we said, okay, we can't do nuclear war because it's been done too much, so let's do an asteroid because it's been a while since the Earth has been destroyed by an asteroid. So we picked that, and then we built the story from the ground up.

See, not very exciting.

Eurogamer I dunno - I like the idea that you decided not to go for nuclear war because the world hadn't been destroyed by a meteor for a while.
Tim Willits

Really that was it. And that's how games actually come about. Talking to some of my friends at other companies, that experience is pretty much the same. I know people would think it would be more glamorous, but it's really not.

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Eurogamer It's just John Carmack going on the NASA website one day.
Tim Willits

Which inspires. It's these elements of inspiration. Once we had that premise, we had to art-direct to get the style and feel, and that really is the essence of a game. It's not the setting; it's what you do with the story that really makes the experience.

Eurogamer Are you worried that now John's on Twitter that some of these amazing ideas are going to be hoovered up by your competitors, or are you confident nobody understands what he's talking about on his Twitter?
Tim Willits

Well, John's always been very public. Do you remember the .plan days?

Eurogamer I do.
Tim Willits

You're old-school if you remember the .plan days. I always tease John Carmack for inventing the blog but never getting credit for it. So many people emailed him that he decided to update his .plan [a text file other people could access over the internet], and just post things there and people could hear what he was working on. So John has been doing it forever, since before blogging and tweeting.