todd hollenshead

Does PC Gaming Need a Savior?

8:00AM Brian Crecente | Despite the doom and gloom that seems to follow the future of PC gaming around there have always been a group of stalwart supports. Developers and companies whose best works appeared first on PC and later, if ever, on consoles. But these days those few shouts in the dark seem to be dwindling. The latest to make the jump? id Software. But id CEO Todd Hollenshead, doesn’t totally agree that they have switched sides, or that there even need to be sides for PC gaming to survive. “That whole PC first thing, you have to go back in id history to see why id initially developed for the PC”, he said. It used to be, he said, that developers had to change so many things, jump through so many hoops, to get their games on consoles that it just wasn’t worth it for some. “Wolfenstein 3D, there was a Nintendo version of that, that was like a black day in id history, how they made us change it to run on the Nintendo platform”, he said. Platform owners “wouldn’t let you publish games on the console. We didn’t want to have our content governed by a third-party”. “But that dynamic isn’t really like there anymore. There are lots of games that have content, whether it’s language or other forms of adult content, that is pushing the bounds of content on all platforms”. More »

Rage and id’s Love/Hate Relationship with the PS3

3:00AM Brian Crecente | Last night John Carmack took to the stage at QuakeCon and inadvertently ignited a fanboy flamewar. id’s upcoming open-world shooter Rage, he told the assembled gamers, will look worse on the Xbox 360 because of storage issues. I asked id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead about that this morning, now that the comment has had time to sink into gaming forums worldwide. “That’s a pretty gross over simplification”, he said. And it was. In fact Carmack’s and Hollenshead’s views on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 as platforms are fairly complex. While Carmack has long said he thinks that the architecture of the Xbox 360 is better, it sounds like he and others at id Software feel that the PS3 has done a much better job of future proofing. This issue with Rage? It’s just the tip of the iceberg unless something is done. More »

Next Doom May Not Be a True Sequel

1:40AM Brian Crecente | The next Doom coming to gamers is so early in development that its creators haven’t yet decided what exactly the game will be about or even what to name it. “The next game in the Doom universe is in development”, id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead told me earlier today. ” We do have the core of the team working on it, under the direction of Kevin Cloud. “We are working on what the story is going to be for the game right now, the logo (shown during QuakeCon) didn’t have a four or a subtitle. We haven’t made the decision about that yet. There is probably a let’s not make a numeral game and some say we should make it one”. While there isn’t a lot to tell yet about the upcoming Doom game, Hollenshead told me everything he was able. The game will be built on the id Tech 5 and will remain true to it’s roots, he said. More »