John Carmack Interview
1UP.com has an interview with John Carmack in which he discusses the recent acquisition of id Software by ZeniMax (the owners of Bethesda Software. Naturally, internet imaginings of Doom/Fallout/Elder Scrolls game combinations emerged the second the deal hit the news. However, Carmack gives a more realistic scenario for future collaboration between the two developers. Feast!
1UP: So can we expect to see any sort of synergy between id and Bethesda? Will Fallout 4 be powered by id Tech 5?
JC: Each of the studios already has a pretty good trajectory going on, and neither one of us is going to be making any sharp turns. That would be a foolish thing to do in an acquisition; to try and force something like that along. We're both doing great independently; the things that we do together will be targets of opportunity. There's going to be lots of cases where there's specific knowledge or expertise we can share; we want to learn everything we can from them about downloadable content, and some of their work going through the submission process on the publishing side of things, and the promotional side of things. And I'm more than happy to share everything we know about different technologies; they can cherry-pick any bit of code they want from our codebases.
When a new team does start up, they'll have choices about how they want to build their technology base. They have a long-term, mature technology base for what they've been doing at Bethesda; they've got people who've been using it for years and years and years. It would not make any sense to just scrap that and change over. But they may wind up taking some technical direction from us. The great part about all of this is that it is in all of our best interests to do everything we can to make each other successful. Because on the off-years, while the next Elder Scrolls is being developed, Doom 4 will be paying their bonuses essentially, and vice versa. We hope to be able to get our two cents in where we think it's going to be valuable, and try to make as much of a difference as we can, wherever we can.