Shack: It sounds like adding content to the game is relatively easy. How much of a challenge has the project been so far?

John Carmack: That's kind of an interesting thing where we announced this at QuakeCon last year, and we started putting our team together, and honestly, we underestimated some of the effort. The idea was, "Oh, we'll take this whole game that we've got, we'll wrap a weapon around it, and put it out and see what happens."

But when we started getting getting down to decisions and saying, we really want to do an absolutely top notch--the game's not state of the art, but the web interface around it really is. And we did not have the experience in website development, database management, and all of that web world type stuff. And honestly, we underestimated the challenge involved in that. So it has been a significant effort taking the game to this point, and I'm sure we're going to run into significant problems as we roll it out and scale it up.

There are challenges there that--it's not that we didn't think there would be any problems, but it's just that we're honestly ignorant of a lot of the challenges. And as far as how successful it is, we can just cross our fingers and hope. We're going to put something really good out there, but in the world of business and everything, sometimes you can have a great product that doesn't succeed. But we can do our side of it, and see what the market thinks of it. But I have some high hopes.

Marty Stratton: And you know, even to John's point, we did underestimate--it's become a much larger project. I think we still make the decisions that are going to make it the absolute best product of its kind--it's kind of a one-of-a-kind product, anyway. But a lot of stuff that we're developing right now and rolling out over the next couple of weeks you didn't see yet today when you joined the beta.

I mean the website even still is totally not--when we launch the new website here in about a week, it's completely different looking. It's really pretty dramatic. So we've taken these challenges, but we're still developing it fairly efficiently. We have a team of about eight guys internally and four contractors externally working on it, so still a relatively small team that's been able to put this together.

John Carmack: I would expect that if we are successful, there will be a lot of other people that say, "Hey, we've got games from nine years ago, let's do the same thing," and a lot of them will probably be surprised at how non-trivial it actually is. It's just one of those napkin ideas that you can lay out really quick, sounds really plausible, doesn't sound like too terribly much work, but they always are.

Shack: How involved are you in the development of Rage and Doom 4 right now, John?

John Carmack: Essentially all of my programming time is on Rage right now, and I will be talking a lot about Rage development at QuakeCon. I duck out for a few days at a time in "retreat mode" to work on mobile projects a couple times a year. Kevin Cloud is running the Doom project, and I won't be involved on a day to day basis with it, although Kevin does run the core decisions by me.

Shack: Have there been any major developments with id Tech 5 since last year's reveal at QuakeCon?

John Carmack: None of the core decisions have changed, it is now just a lot closer to being a game.

Shack: Will you be speaking at this year's QuakeCon? And will there be any major announces from id?

John Carmack: We don't have any shocking news, but I will be giving my usual open discussion about all of our software development efforts and experiences on the different platforms.

Shack: Thanks for talking with us guys.