EA and id first announced a publishing partnership for Rage during E3 2008, but much has changed since that event, including id being acquired by Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media. When the transaction was announced in June of this year, ZeniMax indicated that purchase would not affect games slated for release through other publishers. Now in a brief press release issued this morning, the company has announced that they have acquired the publishing rights for Rage, and EA would no longer be involved.

The change in publishers will not affect the development game.

No specific reason was given for the change. It could be a matter of EA cutting costs, or ZeniMax reining in their own property. We've followed up with someone at ZeniMax, who was unable to discuss the terms of the acquisition, so go ahead and speculate to your hearts' content. I am going to imagine that Bethesda's Pete Hines won the rights in a poker game with EA's John Riccitiello.

"It's not cast in stone yet, but at this point no, we don't think we will have dedicated servers," he said, according to Variety. But he's glad "we won't have to be a pioneer on that. We'll see how it works out for everyone else."

News that Infinity Ward was dropping dedicated server support in favor of everyone playing online through its new matchmaking service IWNet touched, off, predictably, a petition-fueled backlash from a PC community that had long used dedicated servers to play Call of Duty games. Carmack, Variety said, indicated the felt the servers are a relic of PC gaming's early days.

Dedicated Servers and Rage - News You Probably Don't Want to Hear [Variety]

"Wolfenstein Classic was my original experiment on whether a first-person shooter would be any fun on the iPhone," he said. "It did surprisingly well for all of us."

So well, in fact, that Carmack finds himself spending a disproportionate amount of his time working on future iPhone games. Already id Software has released Wolfenstein Classic, Wolfenstein RPG, Doom Resurrection and this week Doom Classic.

Carmack said that there was a lot of "hand wringing" initially over the idea of spending the company's own money (there was no publisher to help fund development) on making games for the iPhone. Doom Resurrection, when it hit, was probably the most expensive game to develop for the iPhone, Carmack says.

But that internal concern quickly disappeared when Wolfenstein Classic hit the App Store.

"It did really well for us," he said. "It was Wolfenstein Classic that made the argument for iPhone development for me. We made quite a bit of money off of that."

After its success Carmack and id Software decided to launch a three-prong approach to iPhone development, working on classic remakes, role-playing titles and original games.

With only a few games out for the platform so far, each game gives Carmack a chance to experiment with development and the technology, he said.

While Doom Classic's touch controls may seem very similar to those found in Wolfenstein Classic, Carmack says there's quite a big difference.

" There were some important changes, like the virtual stick autocentering, changes to precise ramping of movement," he said.

The game also introduces a new control option that allows gamers to turn around in the game by spinning a virtual wheel. But only six months into iPhone game development, Carmack says he already finds himself "hamstrung" by people's expectations of controls set by his previous games.

"We're still feeling out what will play well and what people will like," he said.

Next up for Carmack is Quake Classic, it will be the first shooter that id Software releases for the iPhone that will include the ability to look up and down, not just side to side.

I pointed out that some in the gaming and development community have suggested that both Doom and Wolfenstein Classic control so well because they don't need to worry about up and down controls.

Carmack said that while adding another axis of control is tricky, it would be wrong to dismiss what the current games have accomplished.

"There is an excellent experiment that can be done here," he said. "Play the jail broken Doom and the one I worked on. There is obviously a large difference here. You can be dismissive of the game, that there is a limited control input set, but there is a lot of work that goes into that.

"Everything that has a 32-bit processor has had Doom ported to it, you can run it on a toaster, but it takes a lot of work and care to turn it into something you would choose to play. I had people showing me FPS apps while I was working on Wolfenstein, and they were all atrocious."

Carmack says that it is possible that a fully controlled first-person shooter just isn't in the cards for the iPhone, but he won't really know until he's developed Quake Classic. After that he plans to work on Quake 2 for the iPhone.

"I'm not sure if after Quake 2 I want to do Quake Arena or Quake Live for the iPhone," he said.

The problem is that while Quake Live has better levels it would require WiFi to play online. That's because 3G just won't cut it for Carmack.

"I was originally excited about 3G," he said. "I was told it could have 180 pings, but when I tested it, it was twice that. It was not usable."

While the Classics' line seems fairly mapped out, Carmack isn't as sure about the RPG and original games coming from the developer. He says that the next RPG game will be Doom 2 RPG and if that does well they will move on to the Orcs and Elves RPG games.

The only other original game announced by id Software is one that will be based on their upcoming PC title Rage, but that doesn't mean there aren't others in the works. In particular Carmack is interesting in getting parent company Bethesda interested in bringing some of their games over to the iPhone.

"I spent a bit of time talking to Todd Howard about the iPhone," he said. "We want to make something happen for those products as well."

An obvious choice would be Fallout, something that Carmack says has already had internal proof of concepts made. But nothing has yet officially happened with the game.

Carmack says that Howard, a big fan of the iPhone, is very supportive of the idea and that anything made based on Bethesda's games would likely be created as a joint project between id and Bethesda.

He added that he would be involved in making the game most likely, but that his time is "overloaded badly right now".

"At the very least I'm going to be providing code," he said.

While more people are being brought on to help with iPhone development at id Software, it's clear that Carmack wants to stay involved with the growing business.

"I've had tons of fun working on it as a platform,"he said. "I carry an iPhone around with me as my regular phone all of the time. It's like carrying around a dev kit in my pocket."

The $7 game, designed by John Carmack, features customizable control schemes, 36 levels spread across four episodes, a bounty of weapons and multiplayer support.

Here's the full break-down of game features:
Play the legendary first person shooter, DOOM, with an iPhone or iPod Touch
Fight through 36 missions in four action-packed episodes: Knee-Deep in the Dead, Shores of Hell, Inferno and Thy Flesh Consumed
Experience DOOM multiplayer on your mobile device, including Deathmatch and Cooperative play for up to four players via wireless internet
Choose from three different control types and customize the interface to suit your style
Explore the depths of Mars while utilizing the top down map to help your journey and save your game on the fly
Listen to the original soundtrack or disable it and use your own iPod music

Punchatz who also illustrated for top-flight publications such as National Geographic, TIME and Playboy, suffered a heart attack on Oct. 11 and never regained consciousness. After two weeks of treatment and tests, doctors advised there was no hope of recovery, and Punchatz's family removed him from life support.

"He never wanted to be kept alive like this," Greg Punchatz, Don's son, said to SpectrumFantasticArt, "so we are respecting his wishes."

Punchatz's iconic Doom box was just a small piece of his overall portfolio of work, which brought acclaim from luminaries such as the author Ray Bradbury. Spectrum Fantastic Art reports that Punchatz had already cut his fee to help id Software meet its budget. Id counterproposed that Punchatz accept a percentage of Doom's profits instead, but Punchatz stuck with his fee. "So how was I to know this thing called Doom would make a jillion smackers?" he laughed later.

Don Ivan Punchatz (1936-2009) [Spectrum Fantastic Art via bit-tech.net]

The game notably addresses the "gamex86.dll" error that may have shut your game down for good. The positive news is that you should be able to pick up your progress from a previous save. The bad news is you may have to patch twice. For a full list of changes and places from which to download, hit up Wolfenstein.com.

New Wolfenstein PC Patch 1.11 now available to download [Official Site]

Of course, you can also contribute to the game's underperformance by downloading the Wolfenstein PC demo, yours for the sampling. It's available wherever fine Windows-based demos are offered, places like FileShack and FilePlanet. Or, simply grab the Steam release, which is now available for download.

I learned about this key Rage feature a couple of weeks ago in Texas, as I was wrapping up a chat with three of the principals behind the new game from the makers of Doom and Quake. I'd learned why the developers had combined driving with shooting and was teased about a twist to the game not evident in the Rage demos being held for the press. But that was not enough and I asked for more.

"You might want to say that there are a lot of 12s in it," Matt Hooper, the game's design lead told me.

Tim Willits, Rage's creative director laughed.

I'm sure I looked puzzled, so they relieved me of my confusion.

Hooper said he'd once been in a meeting with game industry executives. He was discussing a game and they wanted to know what the 12 moments in the game were. They didn't mean "12" as a number of moments, but "12" as the level of quality of the game's moments. Any moments that could be merely rated a quality of 10/10 weren't enough. Even Spinal Tap level-11 moments would not suffice. No, the game would have to have moments that could be rated a 12.

So, yeah, Rage will have 12s.

(UPDATE: To those in the comments section for whom I did not write this story clearly enough, Hooper was joking. He does not take the "12" talk seriously.)

Rage also does has driving, shooting and sparing use of monster closets, plus a similarity to Fallout 3, the last big game made by the company that just bought id.

The most striking novelty of Rage is the meshing of trademark id first-person shooting with driving gameplay, all set in a wasteland future of Earth. But while the combination is the critical element of the Rage's gameplay design, Willits said its presence was part of an evolving creative process, not a master plan.

Willits recalled that the Rage development team, which is only about 40 people strong, small by the standards of today's major game development efforts, began by considering the graphical possibilities of the company's new id Tech 5. They recognized they could create beautiful and extensive landscape. And they had a problem.

"We're like, 'We don't want to spend all this time making this really cool environment and having people auto-travel or just magically jump to the next level that they would play in,'" Willits said. They wanted gamers to see the sights — and like it. "We wanted the journey to be as much fun as the [action] when you get there. That led to: 'OK, well we need cars. We're going to want to have badass cars with guns.' That led to this kind of muscle car feel with the kind of buggy formats as well. And then, once we had that, that was a natural jump to the racing. And if you win races, you have to reward the player. If you reward them they can buy cool stuff for these cars." (Read about how all that is coming together in my Rage demo impressions from QuakeCon.)

Some part of that racing-shooting development evolution must have generated a 12. But there comes a risk, when making a game, that your 12s might be the same as someone else's 12s. Say… the 12s of Bethesda, makers of their own (car-less) post-apocalyptic game that stars a character who also begins his or her adventure leaving a survival vault to discover a wasteland over-run by ragged people and mutants.

Don't worry, the id guys said. Rage's post-apocalypse won't feel that much like Fallout 3. "I can guarantee you that our little interpretation of it — and the fundamentals and the core mechanics — are going to be different enough and feel a little different," Hooper said. "It's this action movie that you're living through… we're not trying to be an RPG. I think that's why it's going to end up being different."

Fallout 3's executive producer, Todd Howard, who I interviewed the same day as the Rage guys, let them off the hook. "They've had their own development path for a long time," he said. "I think they're obviously influenced by a lot of the same things that Fallout is influenced by. A lot of those are just post-apocalyptic things." Bethesda and id are now owned by the same parent company, ZeniMax Media.

Rage will be different from Fallout 3 and also different from Doom 3, id's last major game. There was one monster-closet joke that I saw in the demo of Rage that the id guys played for me. A dummy monster pops out of a closet for a mock scare. It's a harmless callback to the criticized attack surprises featured in Doom 3. Though, Willits said, those monster closets in the game were a throwback of their own to the first Doom. Lesson learned? I pointed out to Willits that Doom 3 was not as warmly received as the first Doom. "Doom 3 did outsell all the other Dooms," he said. "But Rage is so much different. It's brighter. It's more expansive. And there are no flashlights in Rage." You know what that means: A whole new set of 12s.

As expansive as the visual scope and the virtual terrain for Rage may be, the creators of id's new adventure talk about creating a streamlined game. "We don't want to make this overwhelming game that you get frustrated with," Hooper said. He wants that action movie pacing. Plus, he dropped this comment, whatever it suggests about how the game will evolve: "We want to the player to make meaningful choices."

Most of the 12s in Rage remain a mystery. What I saw of the game and described a couple of weeks ago remains the extent of what id is publicly discussing about the project — well, short of this tease from art director Stephan Martiniere. "What I can say is a storm is coming," he said. "From a bright blue sky where everything seems to be happy, suddenly clouds are starting to form. There's going to be something ominous in the land that's just going to start introducing itself."

Could that be a 13?

"There is a lot of good to be said about Epic and Valve and the tacks that they've taken," Carmack told me during an interview in Dallas last week during QuakeCon. "They've both grown to be much bigger companies than id Software was.

"And, you know, somebody could look at this and say I held id back, because I did not want to grow the company into a really big company at those times. And maybe we would have been better off to do that, but we came off pretty good, so I'm not going to kick myself over any of that."

Today, id largely makes its graphics tech for its own games. It's previous graphics engine, id Tech 4, powered few of the industry's games. The next one, id Tech 5, is first and foremost being developed for id's own next big game, Rage. It's companies such as Epic that make the graphics engines that power so many games on the market.

Earlier this decade, id Tech 3, the graphics technology used in Quake III Arena, was widely licensed in the industry, used in games like EA's James Bond Everything or Nothing and the first Call of Duty. At the time, Carmack told me, id didn't have the support team to handle a wide number of licensees. "Our technology license stuff was, 'Ok you pay this and you can have eight hours of technical support," Carmack recalled. "You can come down and talk to me for eight hours. Mostly it's, you're on your own, because we didn't have support staff."

To do that better and for more game companies, id would have to grow. Carmack didn't want that. "We knew that we didn't want to have the big support staff like they have for things. And I didn't want to give away the kind of freedom. When you have 50 licensees on stuff like that, you are handcuffed."

Carmack couldn't tolerate having to accommodate the need to minimize his own programming efforts in order to not shift code too much and unsettle the other companies relying on the same tech. "The work I'm doing now on id Tech 5 is changing some fundamental class hierarchy stuff across all of our resources, and it's the right thing to do. It's better, because of that. It's incredibly painful just doing it in our codebase. There's no way I would contemplate doing that if I had 50 other development teams that would have to go through and make similar changes on there."

Money left on the table? Perhaps, Carmack said. "It's a good business on there. We did great on the Quake III generation, tons and tons of licenses on that. But it does tie up your arms a little bit technically and it does mean you're out of the game business and you're in the technology supplier business. There are aspects to that that are admirable. There's definitely a part of me that, as an engineer, says it would be great to try and document this really well, try and clean it up and make it as good as you possibly can, because there's always this balance between making something really good code and rapidly exploring as many things as you can on there."

Let the Epics and Valves sweat that stuff, he is happy to conclude. Let them worry about making sure Unreal Engine 3, Source or whatever else works for all the companies that pay to use it.

"I don't gainsay anybody their success," he said. "I'm happy to see everybody doing good work on there. I think it's great to see Epic and Valve doing their thing. I like the industry. I like seeing the industry being vibrant and competitive. "

The darkness dances in an erratic sizzle of colors from thousands of computer monitors, the pulsing pixels illuminating an electronic shanty town of home-built computers, neon, pillows and people.

This room of humming computers, quietly clicking keyboards, and energized gamers is the throbbing heart of QuakeCon, id Software's annual fan gathering held last week in Grapevine, Texas.

While the free convention, held in a Dallas, Texas-area hotel each year, sheds light on new projects in the works by the famed developers behind Quake, Doom and Return to Wolfenstein, what makes this gathering unique is it's sense of camaraderie. Gamers from across the country, and sometimes around the world, bring their own computers to the event to hook them up in a massive network and game together.

It is, id Software says, three days of Peace, Love and Rockets.

This year the event drew more than 7,000 people to the Dallas-area and included a more than two-hour talk by id developer John Carmack. But QuakeCon hasn't always been so auspicious. The convention grew out of a gathering of gamers in the summer of 1996 that was more pilgrimage than celebration, said id Software president Todd Hollenshead.

"A bunch of guys made a pilgrimage to Dallas to see if they could get (John Carmack) to talk at their LAN party," he said.

The group all gathered at a hotel in Garland, Texas a few miles from id Software. They set up an impromptu tournament and then emailed Carmack asking if he could swing by.

On the last day, Carmack showed up and talked to the group in the hotel's parking lot for about half an hour.

The late night parking lot chat and the days leading up to it have, over the years, blossomed into a gaming party of sorts, with tournaments, music, gaming and Carmack's annual chat.

Although the event has always been held close to id Software's Texas offices, that doesn't stop a group of id developers from moving into the hotel for the show's four days so they can check in as often as they'd like on the 24-hour a day gaming.

"People who come to QuakeCon are genuinely enthused about PCs," Hollenshead said. "They lug their PCs to the hotel just to play for 72 hours."

QuakeCon provides the tables, the chairs, the power and the cabling to hook all of those thousands of computers together, the gamers provide everything else.

"I think this is the largest free event of its kind in North America and the largest bring-your-own-computer in the world," he said.

The lights in the massive gaming room go off Thursday and don't come back on again until Sunday, and some people try to take advantage of every minute of that potential game time.

"There are people who will literally go down there and play until they are done," he said. "We've had instances of people who pass out at their computers.

"People will bring pillows, lay them over the keyboard and go to sleep. We don't encourage that, because it's probably not the best thing."

The computers, many modified into outlandish shapes like small coffins or Transformer Optimus Prime, light up the otherwise darked space.

"It's a cool thing to see - the monitors and the neon," Hollenshead said

While QuakeCon is returning to its roots in some ways, it's also moving forward in others. Earlier this year id Software was purchased by the company that owns developer Bethesda Games.

Last week Bethesda Games attended their first ever QuakeCon, remaining quietly in the background of the show typically dedicated to id. But that is something that could change in the future.

"The potential is that we could have a bigger and more exciting QuakeCon" with Bethesda's help," Hollenshead said.

It makes sense for QuakeCon to try and expand from an id-centric experience to one more broadly dedicated to PC gaming in all of its forms.

The current stable of cutting-edge consoles have eroded the home computer's already failing gamer-base and groups like the PC Gaming Alliance are bringing groups together to try and draw that audience back.

Hollenshead believes that as this generation of consoles age, PC games are regaining their advantage.

"As consoles go into their fifth Christmas the technology advantage of the PC is going to become an important factor," He said. "It's likely over the next couple years that PC gaming will have a a bigger competitive advantage."

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Scoring a headshot in a shooter is, after all the most celebrated action in many first-person shooters.

So what is a headshot on wheels in Rage?

I had Matt Hooper, design lead at id as well as creative director Tim Willis and art director Stephan Martiniere stumped for but a moment

"We have discovered that people love running into stuff," Willits said.

"There's something very rewarding about doing those head-on maneuvers and the guy goes flying," Hooper added.

Speed helps. "There's something satisfying about just pushing up on the accelerator," Martiniere said.

The vehicles take damage in Rage from these head-on collisions, but Willits said that ramming like that is both the most effective and most fun way to take out enemy vehicles.

You won't take that much damage, Hooper said, if you play enough to earn "the coolest of the front grills."

"Its one of the things we learned from testing," Hooper said. "It's fun to ram things."

That's the headshot. On wheels.

Developers usually ask for thirty minutes but here in the second biggest state of the Union, in the 400,000 square foot QuakeCon 2009 hotel, the Gaylord Texan, the development studio behind one of the biggest games of all time wanted to show me their new project.

But for all the talk of scale — for all the mathematics that have dominated the talk about id's next game, Rage, and its amazing technological capabilities — the game demo I got from id was surprisingly focused on nuance, art and color.

Rage is shooting and driving, gun rage and road rage. It's been designed to be swift to its action, to not waste gamers' time, to never let players be lost, and to be gorgeous.

Id's Matt Hooper and Tim Willits took turns controlling a demo that they presented for me in several parts, in a small meeting room at the Gaylord a day before this big shooter-centric convention began. They used an Xbox 360 controller to steer a PC build.

First they ventured into the game's wasteland. Ambling through the dusty, Arizona-style desert, Willits took control of the game's hero — a man never named, in the id tradition of letting the player feel that they are the hero. The game's graphical beauty is arresting, as can be seen in the QuakeCon '09 Rage trailer. The developers talked constantly throughout my demo about creating a game that looks great. Hooper described aspects of the landscape being created to please the eye, of the physical pacing of the character through the world designed to expose the players to grand and lovely sites. "The goal for Wellspring was to make it as gorgeous as possible," art director Stephan Martiniere told me. Good aesthetics are a priority.

Even the people are an achievement. In an interview later, id co-founder John Carmack raved to me that Rage is the first id game to contain "real people," humans rendered with the fidelity to give them life and personality.

A first look at Rage immediately brings to mind the other action-shooter set in a wasteland, Borderlands, though Rage is more of an action-centric game while Borderlands has the player gaining experience points as it calculates damage for every shot. Rage is smoother, more detailed and more organic-looking than the attractive, slightly cartoon-styled Gearbox game.

Rage's wasteland is not post-nuclear. An asteroid hit the Earth, its arrival sending selected citizens of the world into underground bunkers for a humanity-preservation effort called Project Eden. Our hero's bunker is hit with an earthquake; he get out years later than planned, in a jumpsuit and into a world turned Mad Max. There's Fallout to all that; a coincidence, Rage's creators say.

In the wasteland, Willits found a man in a shack named Crazy Joe whose face wrinkled and arms waved with a more authentic elasticity than people in most other games. If current tech often makes characters look to be made of plastic, Rage mixes in some rubber, more closely approximating the movement of bone, muscle and flesh.

We were in the wasteland to see some killing. Outside of Crazy Joe's shack, Willits used a quick-select option to wield the Wingstick, a boomerang of distant death-dealing potential. One far away mutant lost his life this way. The vistas of Rage are impressive, worthy of a postcard from America's Southwest. But they are all the more impressive when one's weapon flies visibly far into that distance and then comes back. The sense of witnessing what could be a mere backdrop painting is replaced by the belief in a continuous, reachable, touchable landscape ahead.

We went to town, a place called Wellspring that combines the look of the Old West with a cramped Chinese village. Hooper raved about significant characters being rendered to look and dress and sound like unique people. He spoke also of exploration and crafting, picking up items and making new ones using a few key components. There's Fallout to all that too, I noticed (he didn't mention), but crafting in this game can be done anywhere, not just at a workbench. That's fitting, as Hooper kept describing the game as one that's designed to waste a minimal amount of time. He wants players to be able to see and do things with immediacy. The id guys steered the demo to Wellspring's mayor, who gave the player plans to build RC-controlled bomb-carts and sends the player to a bandit-controlled base be liberated.

Usually, the player will have to drive everywhere, though that's not a contradiction to id's goal of minimal time-wasting. Hooper said the distance between Wellspring and the based in this mission "isn't just happenstance." It's not a randomly or even mathematically programmed arrangement of sectors. It's designed to pace the player through the action, like a good action movie. And the drive there can be expected to be exciting. For the demo, the id guys loaded right to the base, but driving elements they showed at other moments made clear how such a journey would proceed. The player gains a garage of vehicles, a four-wheel ATV, later an armored sedan or, as shown playable in the demo, a dune buggy. These vehicles can be improved and armed, the better to fend off enemy vehicles in the wasteland. When Willits was driving through the desert at one point, he was being tailed by two enemies. A green circle emerged around his dune buggy to serve as a radar warning for approaching cars. Yellow triangles in the circle pointed to the vehicles hot in pursuit.

Driving's in third-person in this game. Shooting is in first-person. You'll see your hero in his car, but not on his feet. Those perspectives — and those perspectives only, since Willits is leaning against having a hood-camera option for races — are set for Rage. That's because those perspectives are what the developers feel is optimal for the driving and shooting gameplay they have. Again, it's all efficiency and best user experience. Hooper said he's determined to make sure that the driving controls feel natural to shooter players, even, so that FPS gamers won't feel like they're being asked to learn a whole new scheme.

Back to the mission the mayor gave us, we got to this base outside Wellspring, ready to craft remote-control buggies. As open as the game had seemed until this point — and even this base can be visited at any time instead of just when the plot calls for it — the interior offered a return to more traditional id level design. It had corridors and enemies running through them. Hooper, now in control showed off the ability to lay down turrets, to send a spider-robot on a killing spree ahead and, less purposefully, for the Wingstick to get caught in another room because it flew so far away. It won't magically snap back. You have to get it. Enemies wielded their own radio-controlled bombs, one bad guy standing behind green glass with the big controller for his little toy-car-bomb in his two hands. Hooper used his own remote bomb to detonate a portion of the base's interior, allowing him to progress to reaches off-limits to any player wandering into the zone prematurely. He used a cross bow for an optional stealth kill. He used shotguns and pistols for more obvious assaults. He shot the armor off one enemy brute, piece by piece. Had the base been cleared out and the player left, mutants might take over later. There's a flow of life in this world and a reason to return, Hooper said.

Willits took back over to show the game's racing. He found a race promoter in Wellspring standing on a box with a megaphone. Behind him, a burly guy in a shirt painted with a checkered flag occupied a booth. He was ready to dole out races. Rage's races are vehicle specific and, Hooper said, could draw from any of the vehicle elements in the game, allowing for RC Bomb races, jump competitions and who knows what else. Willits played a more conventional three-lap desert dune buggy race made more dangerous with armed competition. It was called the South Highway Combat Rally. During his laps, Willits could collect ammo and speed pick-ups. Enemy shots and car bumps rolled his buggy rolled a few times, but he still won in a minute, 40 seconds. He earned race certificates for winning and a bonus for eliminating one competitor. He could spend those tickets on vehicle repairs and upgrades.

The final section of Rage I was shown was one of those classic locked-room video game carnivals of death. The bulbous TV producer behind something called Mutant Bash TV had our hero locked in a series of rooms, attacked by lanky mutants, while circus music played. The first room had the enemies throwing fireballs. Clearing that allowed the player to walk to the next room, this one jungle-themed with a gorilla statue spinning its blades around the room while mutants flung themselves into the scene via overhanging bars. Then there was a big slot machine to shoot. Then a Kraken level with spikes popping out of the floor as mutants emerge. And, finally, a Big Daddy-scaled boss with a thick tentacle for a right arm. He fired that arm at the player like he was snapping a towel at them. The whole thing took three minutes, forty-five seconds to complete. The reward was $877 dollars, for 46 kills. And the player can keep coming back, their best scores shared through online leaderboards. (id isn't talking about any multiplayer beyond that; when I asked Willits if players should expect id-standard multiplayer he said that the multiplayer is still being worked through and kept secret, that players can think now of Rage as having a rich single-player experience.)

There was a monster closet joke in there somewhere. Monster closets were that old id staple, where enemies hid behind walls, bashed out and mauled the player. They made it into Doom III, by which time some of that game's players criticized them as being archaic. Id gets it. While walking through the Bash TV level, we got a face full of a monster closet. Right in front of our hero a closet sprang open and a dummy monster popped out. Harmless and humorous. No enemy encounters in this game seemed that cheap.

That was an hour of Rage. Did it need the hour? The sprawl suited it. The game appears to break few conventions and may suffer this season from being compared to games out last year and, in Borderlands' case, this October. But as it heads to its when-it's-done release date far off in who knows what year, it will have a chance to clear the pack. I've seen no game that, in this realistic style, looks so good and has a landscape so rich with visual splendor.

Two of id's recent iPhone releases can now be had for cheap, with Wolfenstein 3D marked down to 99 cents and Doom Resurrection marked down to $2.99 USD. The latter might be a wise purchase now, as the forthcoming Doom Resurrection 1.1 update will add a new challenge game mode and one new level.

If that's more inline with you consider appropriate pricing for an iPhone game, then you'd better make those purchases snappy. Those mark downs will only last as long as QuakeCon does. It's all over Sunday.

id's other new iPhone release, Wolfenstein RPG, can be had at the regular price of $4.99, if your pockets go a little deeper.

Keep an eye on the QuakeCon liveblog for more exciting news than this.

Good thing Rage has all of those gun-toting cars thrown into the mix.

He thinks that Sony could release a new console before Microsoft. Here's his rationale: "The whole jockeying for who's going to release the first next gen console is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of things," he says. "Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely. As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We'd like to see it be quite a few more years before the next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later."

Sony has repeatedly stated that the PS3's lifespan is ten years. The console came out in 2006 in Japan, which means that Sony is not expected to release a new console until 2016 or 2017. With the buzz around Project Natal, Microsoft has recently been talking about a longer shelf life for the Xbox 360.

But, all of this is still unconfirmed and merely speculation on Carmack's part. In the rest of the link below, Carmack offers his opinion about more futurey stuff as well.

Carmack talks next gen consoles... and beyond [Digital Foundry via GamesIndustry]

Amid accusations of "lazy developers," id responded to the "ruckus" via its Rage-centric Twitter account today, noting that the developer is "committed to ensuring that gamers on all platforms have a great RAGE experience." Edge's online arm also added to the story, appending comments from Carmack saying "We expect this to be 60 hertz on every supported platform."

Sure, developers may still be having trouble getting the best out of their PlayStation 3 versions of games—a complaint we still hear from those at the development level—but it sounds like id feels it will overcome.

RAGEgame [Twitter via Shacknews]

Why? According to an Activision spokesperson, the delay was made "in order to facilitate a simultaneous global release window for id Software's Wolfenstein."

Activision has therefore "realigned the game's release date for the week beginning August 17th." We're sure that goals were realized to some degree of synergy.

That two week delay for Wolfenstein is the second bit of bad news from Raven and Activision this month. The developer's original time-shifting shooter Singularity was recently pushed into Q1 2010, supposedly to distance it from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's November release.

The slow roll out of Rage info is happening right now at the After The Impact web site. What's there? Not much as of now, with the Flash-based site featuring little more than concept art and a promise of things to come.

With the GI story, QuakeCon and more After The Impact stuff all hitting within the month, expect your hype levels to be set at maximum for the game's 2010 release.

After The Impact