Finally... RAGE!

Founded by rocket scientist John Carmack, pioneer of 3D game engine technology and father of the First person shooters, id software's new game 'Rage' will finally hit the stores today in the US, after four years of hard work! The official European release date for both PS3 and X360 is October 7th, so I guess I'll have to wait till Friday to get my first headshot!

Rage: facts, fiction and mythology.

In 2004 astronomers discovered 99942 Apophis, a giant asteroid bound to hit earth in April 2029. Although scientists have since calculated it will pass our planet at a near distance, they found out that Apophis would near the Earth again in 2036. The original calculations by NASA in 2004 estimated Apophis' impact to be the equivalent of 1440 megatons of TNT.

In 'Rage', Apophis (named after the Egyptian god of chaos and darkness) does strike Earth, erasing more than eighty percent of human civilization. Though scientists found a way for humanity to survive, the experiment known as 'Project Eden', fails. Thousands of Arks, carrying people that were put in cryogenic sleep using a high-tech drug known as 'Nanotrites', were destroyed. Most survivors mutated due to the untested drug, turning them into monstrous beings. The player aka US Marine Lieutenant Nicholas Raine, awakens around 2114, only to find ruined cities in a wasteland full of mutants and a superior military class known as 'the Authority', the new rulers of Earth, who secretly had their own Super Ark to start a new utopian society.

Left: Darkhorse published the first of their three issue limited series of the comic book in June. Right: The Trade paperback will be released October 19th. Story by Arvid Nelson with pencils by Andrea Mutti and inks by Pielugi Baldassini. Cover by Stephan Martinere. Building on the game's storyline, there was also a novel written by Matthew Costello, which was recently published by Del Ray.

Inventor of the FPS genre.

Texas-based Id Software was founded in 1991 by programmers John Carmack and John Romero with game designer Tom Hall and artist Adrian Carmack. They rocked the video game industry when they created a whole new genre with the release of the first 1st person shooter 'Wolfenstein 3D' in May 1992. Heavily censured everywhere for it's use of swastikas and bloody violence, the original game had you searching for the leader of the third reich in the nazi stronghold 'castle Wolfenstein'.

Even more violent as well as graphically innovative, their release of 'Doom' in 1993, was received with both praise and public outcry. The PC game that made headlines as being a 'virtual mass murder simulator' was installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows. The plot of the scifi-horror shooter centered around a space marine that had to fight off interdimensional demons after experiments in teleportation between the moons of Mars by the 'Union Aerospace Corporation' created a gateway to Hell.

Above: powerful artwork for id software's critically acclaimed shooters. The cover for 'Doom' was done by illustrator Donald Ivan Punchatz.

Armadillo Aerospace.

For 'Rage', John Cormack wrote a completely new game engine called the 'id tech 5'. His previous game engines have been licensed for use in many other shooters, like 'Half-Life', 'Call of Duty' and 'Medal of Honor'. In 2000 Cormack also founded 'Armadillo Aerospace' where he is the lead engineer. The company has won several NASA funded competitions and is now working towards building suborbital crafts capable of commercial spaceflight. The 'Id tech 5' engine will also be used for 'Doom 4', which is currently in development using a new scripting language that is based on C++.