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Pretty much no one (except for the parties involved), not even co-founder John Romero, could have predicted that ZeniMax (the parent company of Bethesda) would be purchasing id Software. Yet, that happened, and like everyone else, we had questions about the whole endeavor. We were able to chat with id Software Technical Director (and co-founder) John Carmack and Bethesda Vice President of Public Relations and Marketing Pete Hines about the future of id Software, the reasons why id went with ZeniMax, and whether we should expect Fallout 4 to use the id Tech 5 engine.

1UP: Okay, let's start at the beginning of this sudden and surprising relationship: Who made the first call? Who contacted who first?

John Carmack: Robert Altman from ZeniMax first talked to [id CEO] Todd Hollenshead at E3 almost a year ago, and it really was an out-of-the-blue thing. When I first heard about this, I didn't even know who ZeniMax was. I knew Bethesda, obviously, but I'm not all that networked into the business side of things, and that was a real shocker. If you had asked me, at that point or a few months earlier, it would have sounded ludicrous that id Software would be bought by ZeniMax. But it turns out, a year later, here we are; we're really happy with the situation, and when you look at it on a detail level, it's such a perfect fit that it's almost amazing.

Pete Hines: It's also important to point out that when Robert first approached Todd, it wasn't, "Hey, what would you think of being acquired." It was, "Hey, maybe we should do something together; what would you guys be interested in doing?" I think it started from a simple "how might we work together," and over time, as John and Todd got to know us and we got to know them, that it made sense to look into more than just working together -- making the whole bigger than the sum of its parts.

1UP: A simple question: Why now?

JC: Well, it wasn't really our "plan" to be acquired at this point. We certainly did have long-term plans about maybe entertaining acquisition offers in a couple of years as we staffed up and grew. We enjoyed being an independent studio for a long time, but starting a few years ago, we were making steps to start growing id, so we could really amortize some of our risk. It does get a little bit frightening when every play you're making is a four-year bet for tens of millions of dollars, and you've got 50 to 100 employees that rely on your success. The fact that we've been very successful on every title we've done internally is all well and good.

But we became more and more worried about things that could happen outside our control: we could do a spectacular game -- of course we could always screw up, but assuming we didn't screw up and we did a great job -- there's always a chance of publisher dynamics and other forces outside of our control that could lead to us having, instead of an absolute top-notch bestseller, something more middle-of-the-pack that would put us in a much-worse position for future titles. So we were taking steps to cover that risk by staffing up a second team to work on Doom 4, and we were still funding it all ourselves. We were still doing just fine from a financial standpoint, and like we did with RAGE, we were going to spend the first half of development or so on our own nickel, take a product where you could actually see an endgame to the publisher, and get a really good deal on it.

And we did; we got a great deal for RAGE with EA Partners, and we were expecting to go ahead and get an even better deal for Doom 4. But we were also taking steps to expand into the mobile space and online with Quake Live, and we were eventually planning on building around that kernel. The end goal for us would be to have three teams, eventually, doing all of our products in-house, instead of working with partner companies for our IPs. We'd have Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, and RAGE; one of them would be taking a vacation during each cycle as we cycled through all of that. That was where we figured we'd be in a couple of years.

The deal with ZeniMax, it accelerates that a little bit, but not drastically. We're at a point now where anytime somebody good becomes available for us that would fit into the third team, we'd go ahead and hire them rather than wait and see how the current projects are going. The first couple years of changes we've worked up won't really change all that much. What made things interesting relative to an Activision or EA standpoint, is that ZeniMax is a much smaller, more focused publisher. They've got Bethesda, which has done absolute top-notch triple-A RPG titles out there, and that has absolutely no conflict with what we do with the FPSes. Where if we looked at an acquisition by Activision or EA, they have so many studios doing things competitive with what we're doing, where we would be the new kids on the block and have to fight with our siblings eventually for positioning and prominence inside the publishing side of things.

When we look at ZeniMax -- first of all, the success they've had with Fallout 3 this past year, which was all pretty much after our initial contact with them -- it makes them look really good to us. They were able to take a relatively unknown IP, and do these great things with it. We think that they can do as good with Doom 4, or better, than anybody else. Because it's not a matter of a company with dozens of studios making fifty products a year or something like that; we know that anything we do is really critically significant. Instead of being just one of the slate of titles that goes out in every quarter or something, every product that id Software produces is going to be critical to the company; it's going to actually move it.

We know that we're not just a little cog in the machine there; id Software is the same size as Bethesda and it's great to look at a sister company or sister studio like that, and have everyone think highly of each other's work. There's no kind of jealousy or jockeying for position there; we can look at this and say, "What better combination can we have?" We have a publisher that can say, "Here is the best FPS, and here is the best RPG," to the buyers and have them buy both titles, rather than say, "Well, here's the A-line and here's the B-line, and you might want to fit in some of these games too." We can just come out with the big guns on both sides.