For the last four-odd years, id Software has been in bunker mode. With the now-infamous phrase, "It will be ready when it's done," the staff of the studio that John Carmack built deflected all questions about the development of its groundbreaking PC shooter, Doom 3.

Say hello to your new friend Bernie, the zombie.

However, now that Doom 3 has gone gold, the wizards of id are hitting the publicity circuit, suddenly eager to chat about the title that will force thousands of gamers to shell out millions of dollars to buy PCs powerful enough to play it. In the midst of a recent media blitz, GameSpot got ahold of id CEO Todd Hollenshead and prime architect and lead designer Tim Willits to talk about Doom 3's long road to development, its next project, the future of gaming, and how to create a game scary enough to cause a person to soil his or her underwear.

DEVELOPMENT

GameSpot: To put it mildly, Doom 3 has been one of the most anticipated games of all time. When did you guys finally realize it was done?

Tim Willits: About 45 minutes before Todd announced it! [Laughs] No, actually, we were in beta testing with Activision for about two months or so. We'd wrapped the whole game, and we were just doing some multiplayer testing the last two weeks, making sure the game was as solid as it could possibly be. Literally, 45 minutes after we told Activision, it was a go. Todd made the announcement.

GS: Now the development cycle of this is pretty legendary, being upwards of four years...

TW: Well, when John announced Doom 3, he was working on Doom, but the rest of us weren't. But, yeah, it was a long development time. But we feel the game lived to the vision we had better than we even anticipated. It also proves that id will do whatever it can to make the game as great as possible.

GS: It seems a lot of other high-quality PC games are taking four or five years to develop. Do you think such long development cycles will have an adverse effect on the PC game market?

TW: Well, the development cycle for Doom 3 was at about four years from the very start of it. I count from the start until the finish. Some people start counting from the days where they start moving toward progress, but for me, the clock ticks from day one. The cycle has been a long time, compared with previous id products. Quake III only took a couple of years. Obviously, if development cycles continue to double, it's going to be problematic.

I can't really comment on what everybody else is doing. I can comment for id. We don't think the next game is going to take four years. Doom 3 technology is a brand-new paradigm in terms of the way the world reacts and is created, how art is created, how many textures have to be used, and how that stuff works. When you're working with technology that's not fully fleshed-out, the learning curve is very, very steep. Steep unlike any game that has ever been created. However, now that we've climbed that, we'll definitely benefit from having that experience for our next project.

RECEPTION

GS: How has the initial reception been among consumers? Can you reveal any preorder numbers?

Todd Hollenshead: I don't know the preorder stats. I know they were supposed to be very strong, but part of that was probably because of the preorder campaign that started last fall! [Laughs] It was a little earlier than our preference would have been for it to start, but we got pushed into that a little bit by Activision. Certainly the retailers have been very excited about it. I know the numbers for Activision are the biggest ever for any PC title they've done, and the ship will be bigger than for any id title before now. In the world of big, it's bigger than big. [Laughs]

GAME

GS: Word is Doom 3 will be as much--or more--about suspense than action. How did its development differ from a more standard shooter?

TH: I would say the game is more about terror than suspense, in terms of what it feels like when you play.

TW: Well, you know the development of Doom was much more different from that of any other game we've ever had to develop. We wanted to start out with a story so you have context for your action. We worked with a professional writer to help give us an area--a place for the gameplay. When it comes down to the suspense and the scare factor for Doom, it's all pacing. It's setting up the player with sound, with story, with lighting, with ammo, with monsters, and with hell. It's all carefully orchestrated. We manipulate the feeling of the player with all the assets and technology we have.

GS: We heard that the sound design is particularly groundbreaking.

You're going to need a big gun. Fortunately, Doom 3 has lots of guns.

TW: One of the great things about Doom 3 is that it has six channels of sound. If you have a system with six speakers, you can have creepy sounds behind you, monsters sneaking up on your sides. We moved away from songs that just looped to [instead] create a spooky soundscape within the game, and then we mixed that with pacing sounds.

TH: I'm a skeptic about almost everything, and I was sort of skeptical at first about the impact of the six-channel surround sound. But Tim came in and put speakers behind the computer I was testing on, and it really is an amazing difference in terms of how tense it feels when you're playing through the game. We had a bit of office antics where people would sneak into one another's offices to try to scare the s*** out of one another when we were playing the game. You're a lot more open when you've got speakers behind you because you can't hear people sneaking up behind you to grab you on the neck when you're about to get throttled by a hellknight [in the game]. That resulted in more than one or two changes of underpants in the office. [Laughs]