GameDaily BIZ: So last month id was awarded two separate Emmy Awards. Did you ever think something like that would happen? What was the reaction like at id?

Steve Nix: We were really surprised by that, because first of all we didn't know you could win Emmys for technology, and they said they were trying to expand to include all people who have affected the whole TV experience, not just networks or movies you watch on cable, but also technologies that profoundly affected television use in the home. Since John [Carmack] basically created the technology in games that pushed modern 3D rendering technology they said, "Hey were going to give you guys a couple different Emmys." Because Quake and Doom are such different engines, they decided to give us two separate Emmys. The first one they decided to give to John individually and the second was to id Software for Quake. We were shocked by it and really pleasantly surprised. As a matter of fact, when they first called us, we were like, "Is this some sort of crank call?" [laughs] Then we went to the website and talked to some people and we realized this was for real; we're actually going to win some Emmys. So we were very, very pleasantly surprised. John went out to accept the awards for the company. We have one of them in the office and John has the other one at his house. It's actually not on display; it's shoved in a storage closest right now. You can't just put an Emmy out on the front shelf in the office because pretty soon it's going to run out of the office! [laughs]

BIZ: I didn't know, for these technology awards, that they could give them out to video game companies. I remember when Sony announced that they were getting one for the Dual Shock and Nintendo received one for the D-pad and I thought, "Huh, they're handing out Emmys for videogames?"

SN: They are pushing forward in the committee. The first round is really more historical, people who affected the industry, like what Sony and Nintendo did with their controllers and what id did with rendering technology.

BIZ: Is that something you can use in your marketing materials now, like "Emmy award winning studio?"

SN: Actually, that's a good point. We probably should add that to our "about id" at the end of our press releases. [laughs]

BIZ: There seems to be a lot of discussion about how Vista is affecting PC game makers. Is Vista changing the way id develops games?

SN: We haven't really changed that much in the way that we're doing things. They're doing the tags that we need for the My Games section for all of our old titles, and they've been great about doing that. I think the most important thing about Vista is the emphasis on marketing for PC games because Microsoft had really abandoned the PC games space as they focused on Xbox. Bill Gates came to the guys and said, "Hey, that's great, but the largest gaming platform in the world is the PC." So really the commitment to marketing and just making PC games relevant in people's minds again is the most important factor for Vista. It's really not affecting our development much. I mean, we have some Vista boxes running, sure. Vista doesn't support GL but it has a wrapper that emulates GL. All of our older titles, for the most part, are running fine. Now, we're developing in Direct X, so for the new stuff it's really not a big difference.

BIZ: I believe John Carmack said something about Microsoft artificially creating the need for Vista by tying Direct X 10 exclusively to the new operating system. Is that something that bothers you guys?

SN: [pause] Not really. I mean... sure, they could release Direct X 10 for XP and that would increase developers incentive to go to Direct X 10 more quickly because you'd have a larger base for it. But right now, you don't really get that much with Direct X 10 over Direct X 9 with either current hardware or DX 10 compatible parts. So, it's not affecting us much, but we would be more incentivized to do more with Direct X 10 if it was running on more than just Vista.

BIZ: With drastic advances in technology (DX10, high-end graphics cards, multi-core processors, etc.), is it getting tough for developers to keep up? Will Enemy Territory: Quake Wars be taking advantage of all these features?

SN: Sure, parts are getting more and more powerful. You have CPU, you have multicore, which we're having to get a lot smarter about handling for all platforms and PC. Even though the graphics cards are getting more powerful and can do more passes at once on the cards, what we're doing is more clever techniques with the way we did the mega texture and being able to do the largest outdoor terrain that's ever been done in a multiplayer type game. We can do a square mile of untiled terrain, which no one else is doing and it's really not because of something that happened in the hardware; it was an approach that we used. That's what John always does; he comes up with a unique approach, which is not necessarily the brute force method that everyone else is using to try and draw more pixels and have more textures because the texture memory of the card is increasing. John always seems to come another way at the technology and do something clever that no one is thinking about. But that's why he's John Carmack. [laughs]

BIZ: Enemy Territory is primarily an online multiplayer game. Is there a huge divide between developing a game with strong single player content as opposed to multiplayer? Is there any way to balance the two without watering the other down?

SN: It's tough. Sure, when you're doing a multiplayer game the testing is entirely different. If you were developing a single player game you're going to spend a lot of time bringing in users and putting them in front of the machine and having a team of guys sitting there and watch them play and it's going to be quiet, just seeing what the experience is, like where are they having fun, so the testing is obviously completely different. In multiplayer, it's all about getting a lot of people online and play, so we're running matches basically all day long for Enemy Territory and we have internal beta tests that are going on with Activision, Splash Damage, Nerve and id and we also have a smaller match that we run with Nerve everyday. So the testing is just substantially different between single player and multiplayer. You've got to pick your focus on what you're going to do. We've had games that had substantial multiplayer and single player. Doom 3 was primarily a single player game but it still had pretty reasonable one-on-one multiplayer that was pretty popular. So yeah, you have to pick and choose what your approach is going to be.