Interviews// Paul Wedgwood - Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

So I was obsessed. I carried on working in IT, but just spent pretty much all night every night playing Quake. So then, in early 2000 I started a mod team as project leader – the Q3F mod for Quake 3 Arena. Also, around that time I took a job at Barry’s World as their Infrastructure Manager. And although I was supposed to be ‘an IT guy’ at Barry’s World, I soon found myself presenting a computer games TV show that was going out to Asia Quake Republic and Lock and Load broadcast on Network of the World.

So, for the years 2000 and 2001 – other than the TV job, which was kind of like a Saturday job really - I pretty much spent all my time in the week working with the mod team getting Q3F off the ground. In August 2000 we were all flown out to QuakeCon at id Software’s expense for us to show our mod to the attendees. We just loved it. We were completely in awe of game development. We felt that id were rock stars. We’d brought this high concept for a game with us, that sucked. We showed it to id. They said, “Dude, that sucks!” and that was our first introduction to the reality of game development! [laughs]

Then about a year later in 2001, the TV stuff was winding down and I’d started and properly incorporated Splash Damage. We’d been doing some technology work on the Quake 3 engine for this TV company we were working with. And we were making maps for BT Openworld and a few people like that. But what we really wanted to do was to work on id Software stuff – engines and/or intellectual property – with Activision. So at the end of 2001 we showed id Software what we’d done with our mods again – and by now we’d remodelled everything: the user interface, the character models, the maps, all the textures, the sound effects… the entire game was completely redone for Q3F.

id really liked it and they introduced us to Activision – this guy called Robert Duffy, originally from the community himself (he was the lead programmer with id Software on Doom 3). He gave us our first work for Activision, which was to make a couple of multiplayer maps for a Game of the Year edition boxset for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Then our maps become really popular with the RTCW community and id knew we had these multiplayer roots, so they gave us the deal to work on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. And that – in a round-about way [laughs] – is how we got started.


SPOnG: It’s quite an interesting relationship you have with id Software. Why doesn’t it just employ you directly? Or why doesn’t it ‘buy’ Splash Damage?

Paul Wedgwood: [looks a bit horrified] Well, because Splash Damage isn’t for sale!!

Well, the thing about game development… Let’s say that you had a rock band – a drummer, a guitarist, a singer and a bass guitarist – and you wanted to repeat the success of the rock band with another band. You couldn’t just employ four more members and double the success of your rock band by having eight musicians. It doesn’t make the music any better.

id Software has always stayed a really small company – up until around a year ago they only had 23 staff – so despite having all these projects going on at other developers, internally they have remained a very small company. They are very good at executive production, at nurturing and mentoring other teams.

So, when I started Splash Damage, my goal was to employ as many people I could from the original Q3F mod team and to make a successful business. id Software knows that we are a business – ultimately – and that we got into it because we have a goal of wanting to make really, really good games. And they respected that and have never been bullish with us in any of that kind of sense… ownership or anything like that.