Shack: Does a 3G cellphone connection offer any advantage as far as online gaming?

John Carmack: Bandwidth is good with 3G, but latency is still worse than an old dialup connection. Of course with WiFi, it is as good as any other computer.

Shack: So would you say that id committed to developing an iPhone game?

John Carmack: I definitely want to, and we have some experiments running, but the main team is probably going on to a Doom RPG sequel for Java/BREW next. We have been trying to find someone to lead a dedicated iPhone project that we have been discussing.

Shack: Getting back to Quake Live--is the plan still for the game to be totally ad-supported?

John Carmack: We think that there may eventually be some kind of--I think that there will likely be some kind of premium subscription at some point, but we really don't know what it is. We don't know what we want to offer.

It would not be eliminating the ads, because the ads are actually--if you turned the ads off in the game, it would look worse. The game is so wrapped around this kind of ESPN-ish look and feel that if all of those turned into blank billboards, it would be a detraction from that experience rather than any kind of enhancement.

But there may be something just in terms of people wanting to separate themselves into tiers, or maybe adding some other stuff, but we really don't know, and we're definitely not rolling out with any kind of subscription-based stuff on there.

But it's not just in-game advertising that's supporting it, there are going to be a lot of specific sponsorship things as well. Sponsored levels, sponsored skins, sponsored tournaments, leaderboards and so on. We just don't know how this is going to play out business-wise. It's a big experiment for us. There aren't any real [comparable examples] for us to point to that are really close to what we're doing here.

We can certainly look at lots of successful things that go on on the web, with free content and various things that have done well. There are lots of casual games that are doing moderately well. But this is a new data point, and I'm sure a lot of people will be watching very closely to see how we do.

Shack: As far as capitalizing on the strengths of the PC, will you be planning any kind of community generated content or mod support?

John Carmack: Not initially. That's been one of the toughest questions that people have asked us from day one, is how we're going to be integrating all of that. It is a tough call I expect.

Marty Stratton: Yeah, it is. I mean, in making a system easier--and again, as John has said, this is kind of a test case for us, so we're solving these issues to some extent as we go--in making the system easier, it's required us to take control of a lot more things that we normally do. Taking control of servers, taking control of content, delivering that content--as you probably went through the registration process, you downloaded maybe 180 megs of information basically without even knowing it, because it happened while you were playing your warm-up match. Those types of things require us to take control and somewhat close the system a little bit.

On some of the mod stuff, we've actually talked to the mod teams, particularly the competitive mod type stuff, who have maintained a community of people continuing to play the game nine years later. And we've incorporated a number of things that casual players won't know about. In fact, they're things that will actually make the experience a little bit better for players, but also things that experienced players will really appreciate: weapon tweaks, physics tweaks, networking tweaks, anti-lag stuff. Things that have been done in the mod community previously. We talked to those groups, and in some cases contracted those people to roll that stuff in on our site.

As far as content goes, it really is something that I want to bring in as we go forward, and as the product gets successful. My personal feeling is that it will come in more like user-generated content comes into, say, current social website communities. An idea would be like: we make our SDK available, we run a level design contest, a certain period of time passes, we take those levels, weed out the ones that basically aren't up to some level of quality, and then we put those up on the game, and they go out to everybody. So that again, we don't get that fractured community, where this person is running this mod, this person is running this map, and when you connect to the server it doesn't know that you have it--which is kind of the current state of the original Quake III.

But basically we push all this content to everybody, make it available to everybody, and then on the website we can enable people to either automatically, or by their own input, vote on this content, or put it up a ladder of quality or preference. And then either reward or award the people who created that content, or [reward them] just because it's up on the site and it's the most played map out of all of this user generated content, just like a Youtube video has a certain cache when your stuff rises to the top. I think that is probably the future of the way we're going to be able to deliver new content.

And of course I say all that--that won't be what we do initially. What we're initially focusing on for our first release is getting this core experience, this technology all in place to create a great user experience. But I think down the road, as we do roll in that type of content, we're thinking of new ways to integrate it.

John Carmack: But it's worth remembering that Quake Arena is not going away. It's still there, and I can very much see millions of people making Quake Live as their entry into that, and then the mod community will probably have a huge boost from all of this. The people that want to do something different that's not [supported] in Quake Live, well they've still got Quake Arena. It's open sourced and they can do anything want in there, and build whatever new mods they want, and I would expect this to have a positive effect on that entire community on a lot of different levels.

Marty Stratton: And because the fundamental engine and really the game hasn't changed, we can actually take Quake III content, a Quake III map--not so much a full mod--but a Quake III map, and it basically comes into the game in a matter of minutes. It's very easy, so, you know, it could be something where it just reinvigorates the Quake III mod scene, and we can continue to take a look at that and bring stuff to market that makes sense.