VB: John, why did you go through the process that ended with the sale of the company?

JC: We have had offers made to us continuously over the years. We made changes a couple of years ago where we decided to get away from doing just one project every four years. There were structural reasons why we had to do that. There was the pace of technology and how long it took to create a new game technology. Then there was the time it took to train the game team how to use the technology to make a game. It was clear that we had to leverage our technology and get things into a pipeline. All the publishers were telling us that it was wise to license out our intellectual property to get more projects under way at once. The publishers told us that we would be more valuable to them if we built our team larger. So we listened to that. We took games pretty far into development on our own nickel before pitching the publishers. That’s what we did with Rage. That was our plan of record.

VB: Then ZeniMax approached you?

JC: ZeniMax came with an offer. The more we looked at it, the more we liked it. The two obvious choices [of id buyers] were Electronic Arts and Activision. They’re the two giants of the industry. But we knew that we would have to go through big corporate changes if we went with them. We know the developers at the studios owned by those companies. And while they have good things to say, there is no doubt about it that things would change at a company of that scale. If we had gone to one of those companies, we would be one more studio. We would be a prized studio. But we wouldn’t even be their only shooter studio. We would be competing for resources with our brother and sister studios. There is no question if they have Call of Duty project, there would be some degree of conflict there. With ZeniMax, they have a lot to be proud of. Fallout 3 is one of the favorite games of so many of our people. But they had zero overlap with the things we do. We do the best shooters in the world. It’s a perfect hand and glove fit. We started talking about this before they rolled out Fallout 3. We watch them roll it out worldwide. They really did what they said they could do. That was a important in how we looked at this. They resurrected an old title and really made something big out of it. We could be a sister company with Bethesda, where we had a lot of mutual respect and admiration. That was about as good as it could get. And we could do our games the same way we have been. The corporate cultures are compatible. And when we go out to publish the games, now we will be doing that. We can become a publisher through ZeniMax.