Gaming site IGN recently got a chance to sit down and chat with Todd Hollenshead, the CEO of ID Software, about their upcoming game, Doom III. The interview covers various aspect of the game, and focuses as well on the story and locations of the game.

Here's a brief excerpt:

IGN: What is the concept behind DOOM 3?

Todd Hollenshead: To go way back, after we finished up Quake 3, John Carmack was looking for what he was going to do with his next rendering engine. He has the ability -- not only through his own insight, but also through knowing what direction the hardware companies are going with respect to the visuals that the graphic cards, as they come out, are going to be able to present. John made the decision early on that, basically, it was time for a paradigm change. If you go from a technological standpoint from Quake to Quake II to Quake III, fundamentally the improvements in graphics technology were about more polygons and more colors.

John looked at what was coming on the horizon with hardware acceleration, with geometry acceleration and lighting calculations being able to be done on the graphic accelerators and realized that lighting and shadowing in real time was going to be an impressive visual impact. As he came to that realization, he also realized, hey, not only can we do something that's really cool visually, but this is something that, in terms from an atmosphere standpoint -- because lighting and shadowing can be so moody and atmospheric -- for a scary game, this is an ideal mate.

That is how the idea gathered momentum going forward. Then as we started putting gameplay to marry that with the technology aspect -- you know, we could of done a sequel, or what have you, but we decided, just as John had thought, "Well this is sort of the game I really envisioned in my mind's eye when I was thinking about what DOOM really would have been like." We said, instead of making a sequel to DOOM II or, you know, Really Final DOOM, how about we just retell the story.

Doom 3 Q&A

id Software

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