The big surprise of the week for me wasn’t Will Wright “leaving” EA or the surfacing of Assassin’s Creed 2. No, it was the announcement of a new Painkiller game. Though it isn’t being made by the original game’s developer People Can Fly (who are now owned by Epic Games), it’s hard to imagine that a team (albeit one with no trackrecord to speak of ) using the same tech and the same gameplay framework could go wrong. Add co-op to the mix, and I’m on board.

Here in this video is an invaluable look at what id Software was like in 1993. Doom development was wrapping up with sound creation and performance optimization. It’s surreal to watch this video with the knowledge of what the shotgun will really sound like while watching John Romero play with placeholder sounds from Wolf 3D SNES. They had no idea yet.

I wanted to quickly share with you a video that has me geeking out. This is a video of a Lunar Lander Challenge in which Armadillo Aerospace competes with TrueZer0 for a prize of $350,000. Armadillo Aerospace is a private aerospace group that was founded in 2000 by John Carmack. Carmack is co-founder and lead programmer at id Software, a pioneer in the gaming industry which has developed such games as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake and are currently developing Rage. I’m no rocket scientist (har), so I’m not sure how unique an accomplishment this actually is in the world of privatized aerospace, but I still think it’s pretty damn cool to watch.