Carmack & Stratton Quake Live interview at QuakeUnity.com

One day after the Quake Live public beta release, QuakeUnity published this interview with Marty Stratton, producer of QuakeLive and John Carmack, id Software‘s co-founder and lead programmer.

In this interview, John and Marty discuss several aspects of Quake Live such as backend infrastructure, their work with mod authors to bring additional features to the game and the hiring of developers from inside the Quake community.

QuakeLive Mod Support

Marty Stratton: We feel like we have a pretty compelling offering with over forty arenas, five of which are completely new for QuakeLive. Most of the good Team Arena content has been included and everything has been given a pretty dramatic facelift. We’ve taken a lot of the competitive changes for arenas and moved them over to QuakeLive. In most cases, they have been a positive change for both the competitive and new players as far as balancing out item placements and things like that. We’ve looked at a lot of different ways mod teams have done things. Obviously, Rocket Arena is a pretty big thing and Clan Arena falls into that general category, although slightly different. We didn’t want to take anything directly from other mods, but rather include our own offering.  “Moving forward, additional content will depend on how our business model works out and what type of audience we have. The system has been developed to allow us to add new content relatively easily, but a lot of the uniqueness of QuakeLive comes from the fact that we control everything. It’s a bit of a tradeoff, but I think we have a nice balance. Hopefully we have a lot of really excited players and the advertising revenue comes in. If that happens, we can keep the team together supporting the game.

Another interesting detail revealed in the interview is the hiring at id software of the Quake 3 CPMA modification programmer Kevin “arQon” Blenkinsopp for the Quake Live project.

The CPMA modification is mostly known for it’s wide range of competitive gameplay features and promode gameplay.

You can read the complete interview at QuakeUnity.com.