"What will you find at QuakeCon? For starters, you've got a LAN party that'll boggle the mind, with thousands of gamers participating in massive 256-player tournaments or open gaming. Running parallel to the gaming you've got workshops, where id Software and others will talk about modifying the DOOM 3 engine, building the perfect game ... as well as their next "big thing."

"GameSpy: How much would you say the technology influenced the design of the game from the ground up, and then how much did the game evolve over the course of developing it from what you originally envisioned it to be?

Todd Hollenshead: The game ended up very close to what we originally set out to create. John had been working on the technology before we actually started in earnest on the game design, because John actually started on the technology after Quake 3, and the rest of the team, from a content standpoint, was working on Team Arena through most of 2000. So when we started working on the game, John already had an idea about "Hey, look, the technology's strong points are going to be emphasizing these elements." The interaction of light and darkness, being able to hide things in shadows, being able to make people uncomfortable because they can't see what's in there because it's too dark, sort of having not only the trepidation of going through an area that's kind of foreboding with stuff that can get you to the "boo!" or scare effect, too.

Horror movies have used those same techniques. There's multiple ways in which you sort of make a scary experience: you do it through building tension, you do it through surprise, you do it through stuff that looks really scary, and then you try to make it very atmospheric. With DOOM 3, the idea of making it very cinematic was one that was there at the very start. There was just sort of congruence of what John was doing, where the visual impact was from the technology side, and then what DOOM 3 as a scary action-horror game could be. John saw that very early on, and pitched everybody and said "hey, this is the type of game I'd like to make" and then we created the design from that. That was just the kernel."