Rage, the latest shooter from id Software, will be released on October 4.
Image courtesy id Software

Both Tim Willits and Matt Hooper got their start in game design as fans, creating maps for id Software games like Doom and Quake. Now, as the studio celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, both are working on the studio’s upcoming post-apocalyptic shooter Rage. It’s a game that not only represents id’s first new franchise in quite some time, but a culmination of two decades of first-person shooter design.

1957: The Space Age dawns a little sooner than expected with the successful launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. It’s a pivotal moment, the kind of event that — more than five decades later — still has people asking, “Do you remember where you were when …?”

But Sputnik may not have been quite the world-beater it seemed at the time. In interviews leading up to the 50th anniversary of the launch, Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program, admitted that Sputnik was something of a lash-up, a hastily put-together gamble using a spare rocket and a satellite assembled from...