Rage Game .net

John Carmack talks with the guys over at GameInformer.com about Rage and id Tech 5, the engine on which it’s being built. The interview itself is very insightful, explaining why id Software decided to “branch out” from the corridor FPS games they have become famous for. He also shares with us that the game currently has a $20 million budget. Here is a short snippet taken from the interview:

GI: What can you say about Rage? When everyone saw the shakey-cam footage people were wondering if you were making a racing game….

Carmack: It’s about 50/50 racing and first person action. It’s interesting. If we go back post Doom 3, we started making a completely different game. It’s internal name was The Darkness, which it’s obvious that someone else has taken since then (laughs) but it was going to be another spooky dark survival horror thing set on an island. We spent a lot of time going on that. But we reached this point where, “Do we really need to do another dark, spooky game?” id always gets slammed for the game is always too dark. Maybe we should do another game that’s a little brighter. We can branch out a bit more. Maybe it would be more fun to run over people with pick up trucks and ATVs. We rebooted our entire development project. We were reasonably far into production on The Darkness title and we just said we wanted to go in a completely different direction. We wound up with this post-apocalyptic Road Warrior type thing.

Read the whole interview here.