Let's face it: The HotHardware we crave, we craved first to play Doom. John Carmack, the programming genius that got all those sprites and textures to appear like magic on my pokey 386, is the old man of the industry now. Wired asks him what he's up to, and what he thinks of computer gaming in general.
For the time being, Carmack spends two-thirds of his time at id working on a secret new game. Although it will be a 3-D action title, it won't take place entirely in the first person, and won't revolve entirely around shooting. Other than that, he's not saying, although he is confident that once again, he and his team will make substantial technological leaps.
"There's going to be a novel look to our next-generation technologies. Once it's out there and people look at it, people will see the wisdom of pushing things data-wise instead of procedural-wise on large data sets," Carmack says. "We can ... get away from the tiling, and repeating, and stuff like that, for all the surfaces across the game."