Shooting-game pioneer id Software aims to be all the 'Rage'

— -- The Mesquite, Texas, software studio that virtually established the first-person shooter as an enduring genre has finally reloaded.

With the long-awaited Rage ($60, for PS3, Xbox 360 and Windows PCs, for ages 17-up) arriving in stores Tuesday, id Software, once a garage-band PC game developer, moves beyond its primal run-and-gun impulses to deliver a fully fleshed-out title it hopes will become a blockbuster in today's console-game marketplace.

"For a long time, the id games were about a core mechanic. You run around, you shoot things, you pick up stuff and you try to avoid getting shot," says id Software co-founder John Carmack, among those responsible for iconic shooting titles Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake over the past two decades. "With Rage, we have brought in all this other stuff: driving, collecting, the economy, the adventure elements and the achievements. At its core, it's still about shooting, collecting and avoiding dying, but now we are doing a much better job of pacing things out."

It has been six years since id last released a full game, 2004's Doom 3; since then, the designers have developed a deeper respect for underlying narratives. Rage's setup: As an asteroid hurtles toward Earth in 2029, the government creates a project to put a select group of people into cryogenic sleep and bury them deep underground, in pods that would re-emerge decades later, after the asteroid's damage abated.

Not all goes as planned, and a few survivors emerge into a post-apocalyptic landscape with mutants, bandits and a power called the Authority. "The Authority is trying to shape the future of mankind. and you will eventually team up with the resistance (against the Authority) and learn why you are important," says creative director Tim Willits. It's "richer, deeper and broader than anything we have done in the past."

To survive, a player earns and maintains a vehicle for traveling the wasteland and must upgrade weapons to handle the agile, relentless enemies. Visiting ramshackle towns and settlements, players also can make money by racing and playing games of chance.

"As a gamer I like having all these aspects of gameplay. It really adds a lot of substance and weight to the world," says Brian Crecente of game news site Kotaku.com. "The people who still adore Quake and Doom and all those older games, and are waiting for Doom 4, are going to be very happy with what they find (in Rage)."

After finishing the PC version of Doom 3 in 2004 (developer Vicarious Visions created a console version with Activision a year later), id looked for its next move. "We knew we wanted to do something different," Willits says. "We saw the landscape changing. We saw that we needed to explore different game modes and different levels of game play, which excited us."

The developers never budged from the first-person perspective, in which players view the game through the eyes of the shooter. "We have always thought that makes the player most connected to the experience," he says.

But they knew they had to break out of their older "maze" mentality, which had players moving through intricately mapped corridors. "We knew we wanted to have expansive vistas so you weren't just stuck in this tiny little tube, like you were a hamster in a cage," Carmack says. "We wanted to open it up and make it a less-linear adventure and more visible."

The studio also had a goal of launching a franchise that could, as Willits says, "stand head and shoulders with Wolfenstein and Doom, but be different."

A limited version of Rage for iPhone and iPad (99 cents or $1.99 for Rage HD) served as a teaser last fall. A three-issue Dark Horse comics series ran this summer, and a novelization by author Matthew Costello (who helped write the game's storyline) hit stores a month ago. "It'a rich and diverse universe that, hopefully, we can continue making Rage games in," Willits says.

As for what's next for id, Carmack says the studio, which over the years has grown to employ about 200, is close to having details on Doom 4. "In an ideal world, we would like to have a release a year, but we are not there yet."