If you're a fan of the Doom franchise then here's some good news! id Software has announced that they're working on Doom 4 already. Interestingly enough, the game might be headed multiplatform on the company's new proprietary engine. To find out more, head on over to the full article.

Activision, Vivendi, NCsoft, and Her Interactive have already dropped from the E3. It seems that another company is going to jump ship from the upcoming event. From the looks of things, id Software might soon follow suit as they are unsure about their plans for E3. Find out more in the full article.

Video gaming site Shacknews recently scored a huge interview with id software's Todd Hollenshead and Tim Willits. In it, both men talk about Rage, id's upcoming title for the Mac, PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 platforms.

First off, the setting. Rage takes place after a comet hit Earth and wiped out civilization. While civilization tries to rebuild itself, players will take on the role of the hero as they try to help the remnants of humanity fight back against the new regime that's risen.

Surprisingly enough for an id title, there's a lot of racing involved in Rage. Players can soup up their cars with modifications and upgrades then head on to different towns where they can take part in races. Players will also need their car to travel around Rage's world getting missions, playing through instances and even stopping in the middle of nowhere to admire the scenery.

Of course, Rage also includes a lot of shooting. As Hollenshead said, there's a certain level of anarchy in the game as represented by the "A" in the game's logo. Side content is also a big thing in Rage, and the game looks pretty big judging from the interview. Willits references Bethesda's Oblivion by saying, "You can go and just do all the missions in the story, like in Oblivion, or you can go do other missions."

On the multiplayer side of things, Hollenshead said that he expects the game to be online on consoles. There will be co-op but versus multiplayer has yet to be decided on. According to Willits, the plan is to let players "find someone who can go on and do some co-op missions. If you finish a few, you can go do something different yourself, then go find someone to do the rest."

To find out more about Rage, click on the Read link below. The full interview's a pretty interesting read so check it out.

If you loved Doom in the past and you're enjoying the classic demon-blasting FPS again via digital download from the Xbox Live Arcade, you're going to be happy with a recent confirmation coming in from id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead.

Hollenshead said that following the success of Doom, Quake III Arena is already under development for the online service. No tentative release period was announced, but it's pretty exciting nonetheless.

Doom and Quake are both franchises stemming back from the 90's which saw the rise of the FPS genre. Once called "corridor shooters," the games initiated by id grew into a more free and vibrant field which gave birth to some of today's greatest games.

In related news, it was reported in 1up recently that Quake Zero is also in the works. No specific platform has been announced but one possible clue is that it'll be built on the same engine as Quake III.

The project is slated to be a stripped down and rebuilt version of the old title with some new added elements. Plans stand right now to make it a web application so that it takes up minimal cost. This one should be free to play. We'll keep you posted for more.

Though it's probably a stunner to hear from the makers of Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake and all other iterations of the first-person shooter forerunners, id Software decided that it was high time they laid down their side of the gaming violence controversy, oft opposed by one crusading Florida lawyer.

  

If Take Two wasn't high in the possibly politically-driven campaign against games, it was Doom that critics often placed the blame on for violence sparking from video games. The Columbine massacre was one such tragedy linked to id Software. Caught in the middle of all the heated discussion, id appeared to have let out a heavy sigh in an interview with Games Industry and speak out on gaming from the gamer's perspective.

"I think the media is always looking for stuff to make headlines, and they sensationalize things. They take something that they know will make news and they run with it and then figure out whether it's true or not later," said CEO Todd Hollenshead.

More on id Software's opinions of hostility against gaming right at the Full Article!

GDC 2007 had a panel on piracy. And even if you believe that they're just whining about the supposed "cost" of piracy to the business, if GDC has a panel on that, then THEY, the devs, believe it's a problem for THEM, the devs. Take id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead, who, according to Joystiq's coverage, points to internet piracy as the reason why Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has gone multiplatform.

Why? He says that console piracy is minimally relative to PC piracy. "By a large factor."

Here we go again. The nitty gritty of the economics of piracy to developers is more complicated than you think, which all depends on the popularity of the game in various territories, enforcement if intellectual property laws in those territories, the financial health and development portfolio of the developer... you get the drift, right? And our take is that ethics... is ultimately the responsibility of the guy practicing it, not to the guys preaching it.

Short version to chew on, though: professional devs need to eat, too. Easier job if you've got Gears of War in the bag and Unreal Tournament 3 in the side pocket, perhaps - pirates might as well be tilting at Catalan windmills. And while Quake Wars comes from a long-running franchise, if its developer is looking to consoles as part of a loss-mitigation strategy...

GDC 2007 Organizers have added three more notable lectures to the March conference, with three big names giving talks on piracy, 2D gaming, and a postmortem analysis of the PSP hit LocoRoco. This is the third batch of major additions to the GDC 2007 lineup.

Let's start things off with the LocoRoco postmortem. Presented by Tsutomu Kouno, "A LocoRoco Postmortem: Making Happiness into Gameplay" explains how Kounu tried to make a game out of... well, happiness. It will take audiences "through the path of the game's development, from brainstorming the creative concept, selling it to Sony, and building it level by level".

Next up is Konami's Koji "Iga" Igarashi with "Light and Darkness of 2D Gaming". As can be gathered from the title, this lecture - which incidentally is Iga's first-ever public lecture - tackles the advantages and disadvantages of creating 2D games in a market dominated by 3D games. Iga will "use his experience developing the recent and highly-acclaimed Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin video game for Nintendo DS as a case study".

Lastly, id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead has a lecture posted named "The Videogame Piracy Problem: Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest". Hollenshead will use the lecture to "discuss the state of the piracy problem the game industry faces, paying particular attention to the impact Internet piracy has on the PC game industry". Hollenshead will also discuss "what to do, as well as what not to do in best protecting you company and game assets from those that fly the Jolly Roger".

Game Informer interviewed id Software's John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead about the QuakeCon, the state of PC Gaming, and the pros and cons of developing for the PS3 and the Xbox 360. The interview gets a bit lengthy so we'll just relay to you folks the juicy bits, and if you're interested about further details, you can make use of our source-link below.

Here's John Carmack on developing for the Xbox 360:

Microsoft has made some pretty nice tools that show you what you can make on the Xbox 360. I get a nice multi-frame graph, and I can label everything across six threads and three cores. They are nice tools for doing all of that, but the fundamental problem is that it’s still hard to do. If you want to utilize all of that unused performance, it’s going to become more of a risk to you and bring pain and suffering to the programming side. It already tends to be a long pole in the tent for getting a game out of the door. It’s no help to developers to be adding all of this extra stuff where we can spend more effort on this.

His thoughts on developing for the PS3 await after the jump!

In case you've forgotten, let us remind you of the statement uttered by Id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead a few weeks ago regarding more of their classic titles appearing on XBLA: "Making the surprise announcement at X06 for DOOM worked out great, so I'll be tight lipped about anything specific for now." As promising as it sounded back then, we learned today that we'll all be getting more than what we actually wished for.

Graphic designer Kevin Cloud declared recently that their company, Id, and Wisconsin-based developer Raven Software, are currently working on a full-blown Castle Wolfenstein title. In case you guys are not aware (but you should be), Wolfenstein popularized the FPS genre for the PC. So in short, pay some homage rookies! Anyway, moving on...

"What we're doing with Wolfenstein is creating this one, large empire that is seamlessly loaded to the player as he explores his world," disclosed Cloud. Developer John Carmack, on the hand, said that "The Xbox 360 is the first console that I've ever worked with, that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we've got for the PC." With such words coming from the programmer extraordinaire, we can't help but feel giddy and excited.

No details are available for the next-gen Wolfenstein...for now. Despite that, X360 gamers can definitely sleep sound tonight and dream of castles and first person shooters as Cloud leaves us with this parting statement: "Wolfenstein is really a way of redefining the way first person games are experienced."

Once DOOM was surprisingly added to the roster of Xbox Live Arcade titles as X06, it has gotten many people wondering if more of id Software's gaming library would be coming to the arcade anytime soon. The FiringSquad actually went out of their way to find out and contacted id's CEO Todd Hollenshead to find out for themselves and 360 gamers everywhere whether or not if more of their games will be ported to the system. This is what he has to say:

"We're looking at bringing some of the other games to XLA, but a lot is going to depend on the response to DOOM. From what MS tells us, its been fantastic so far, which bodes well for other id "classics" to be released there. But there's nothing concrete. Making the surprise announcement at X06 for DOOM worked out great, so I'll be tight lipped about anything specific for now :)"

So if you're hoping for more old school first person shooters such as Wolfenstein 3D or Quake to play online with friends over Xbox Live, it looks like action will speak louder than words so everybody should start buying DOOM on the Marketplace for 800 Microsoft Points - that's if you haven't already.