Id Software's John Carmack and Marty Stratton recently did a round of interviews with several major web publications about Quake Live and the future that the game holds.

Marty Stratton on Quake Live's userbase:

"When we started this, we were originally thinking it would be maybe a six-month project, to sort of wrap a website around Quake III, and get it out. And here we are almost a year later and it's just about to roll into a larger beta. On the other hand, when we first paced this thing out, there were really solid arguments that could be made that we would see 50,000 users, 500,000 users, or 5 million users. We really didn't know. There were at least two orders of magnitude of uncertainty as far as how many people would be interested in playing something like this. Some of that has at least been relieved now by the fact -- I was very happy to find over 100,000 people signed up for our beta with no promotion, no advertising, anything like that. Which in hindsight I suppose makes good sense, there are one to two thousand people usually playing Quake online when you sample, which means there's a community of many tens of thousands of active Quake III players still, nine years after the game was released."

John Carmack on the advertising that will support Quake Live's ability to be free:

"It's worth noting that I've never been a big supporter of in-game advertising in conventional games because I definitely do feel that if you're playing 50 to 60 bucks for a game, throwing advertising in on top of it is…there's a justifiable reason for some people to be upset about that. Quake Arena was always much more of a sporting arena combat sort of thing where integrating advertising directly into the game doesn't even feel like a tacky bolt-on. In fact what we've done with Quake Live is all of the original levels have been passed over and brought up to a modern level of polish where eight or nine years ago when Quake Arena would have been out, the state of the industry accepted a lot of things like mismatched texture seams and things that just weren't quite up to the level of attention to detail that we follow now. All the levels have had a pass through them bringing the attention to detail to modern standards without changing anything fundamentally in the graphics engine, just touching up all the data. They've also then been modified so that all the levels have billboard type things in them which are nicely integrated with spotlight lighting and so on in there where we can stream in-game ads as well as of course things that happen on the scoreboard and when you die and so on. It's a perfect fit for this type of thing because it's not a matter of taking some game we just happened to have around and throwing up ads that you can't skip in between every level or something like that, it fits well with the original tone of the game."

Marty Stratton on Quake Live's surprisingly graphical appeal:

"One nice thing, just to add to that, is that the game now basically runs automatically at whatever resolution your monitor is at. It just detects and does that automatically. Obviously it starts out in a web browser, you can play it at any point in a web browser interface with your friends list on one side, but just going full-screen, it automatically goes to the maximum your monitor will support. So if you've got a monitor that's over HD resolution, the game just looks ridiculous. It's amazingly crisp and sharp. Even compared to modern games, you lose a lot of the jagged edges, just because you can run at such a high resolution. Any system you've bought in the last three years, even at the highest resolution, is still going to run it at 120 frames per second