While casting calls and web domain registrations have already seemingly peeled back the curtain on the next proper Grand Theft Auto game, a report on GameSpot says that title is a lot further along than you'd think.

According to "sources close to the Take-Two Interactive subsidiary" (that subsidiary being developers Rockstar), development on Grand Theft Auto V is already "well under way", with a 2012 release looking "pretty likely".

Earlier rumours and reports on the game hint that it'll be taking place in Los Santos, the Grand Theft Auto universe's equivalent of Los Angeles.

We've contacted Rockstar for comment, and will update if we hear back.

Grand Theft Auto V development 'well under way' [GameSpot]

Time for another "before they were famous" here on Total Recall. Last time we looked at Bungie, creators of the Halo franchise. This time? We're looking at id Software, the team behind Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake.

I'm going to preface this entire thing by saying that if you're at all interested in the history of video games, and in particular the PC and id Software, you owe it to yourself to read the amazing Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, which goes into a lot more detail than I'm about to.

That's for later, though. For now, we're going to run through the early years of one of the most important studios in the industry, and look at the games they made before they made the ones which got them famous.

id was founded in 1991, after a number of its earliest members (John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall) met while employed at Softdisk, a weird hybrid of a magazine, games developer and demo disk distributor. Yet perhaps the most interesting thing about the studio's early years predates the formation of the actual studio.

A year earlier, John Carmack and John Romero had built, from the ground-up, a PC port of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. 3, at the time a remarkable feat given PCs weren't supposed to be able to handle side-scrolling like a console could. Initially a crude demo using characters from a Romero game built for Softdisk called Dangerous Dave, (and which they christened Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement) the guys eventually had Mario looking so good, and so faithful to the original, they contacted Nintendo about licensing the game from the Japanese company for release on the PC.

While Nintendo of course turned the offer down instantly, another party had become secretly interested in the team's work. With games like Dangerous Dave attracting a cult following, a representative from publisher Apogee began writing to Romero under the guise of a fan, so as not to alert Softdisk, as he had every intention of luring the guys away to make their own games for a living using the concept of shareware, which would see part of a game given away for free to tempt people to pay for the whole thing.

Tempted by this offer, and capitalising upon the platforming technology they'd built for the Mario demo, the team whipped up a side-scroller called Commander Keen, released in December 1990, which quickly became a hit. Keen was a small boy transported into a science-fiction saga, armed with a trusty laser pistol and defended by an oversized...Green Bay Packers helmet.

This only brought about the attention of the team's employers at Softdisk, however, who rather than crack down on them (the guys had been using Softdisk computers after office hours to compile the code for their games) offered to go into business together. That deal fell through when the existing Softdisk management baulked at the idea, though, so in February 1991 id Software stopped being "a bunch of Softdisk guys working in their spare time" and began operations as an independent video game developer.

While it continued developing Commander Keen games for a number of years, id's first new titles were both games that would be critical to the studio's future success. In April 1991, id released Hovertank 3D, one of the first games to ever be played from a first-person, 3D perspective on the PC. It followed this up in November 1991 with Catacomb 3D, an adaptation of an old John Carmack fantasy title dropped into the same revolutionary 3D engine.

These games, while important in their own right for their technological prowess for the time (3D and first-person being normally reserved for poorly-detailed flight simulators), are best remembered now for being essentially testbeds for the engine used in Wolfenstein 3D, released in 1992.

From Wolfenstein, one of the earliest blockbusters in PC gaming, things went from strength to strength for the team, who despite some high profile personnel changes (like Romero's departure to make the disastrous Daikatana in 1996) would go on to release classics like 1993's Doom, 1996's Quake and a number of well-received sequels for both, not to mention also being responsible for engine technology that has powered many other developer's games like Half-Life.

If you thought Duke Nukem Forever was the last gasp for the '90s video game icon, well, what the hell were you thinking? Publisher Take-Two certainly isn't done with Duke, regardless of the reaction to his latest game.

Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick tells Forbes that "you will see future Duke IP coming from this company." Pretty clear cut, but Zelnick gets less clear when expounding upon the future of Duke (and other games).

"Part of it is the economic opportunities that interact with entertainment are so huge," Zelnick says. "Part of it is that we are very creative folks in control. Part of it is we don't want to ever be in the position of dumping something down just to make another buck. If we can take some of our intellectual property and bring it to another medium in an extraordinary high quality way, that delights consumers and represents an interesting commercial opportunity for us, we will. We have certainly considered doing that with BioShock and with other titles. So far we haven't brought anything to market, but stay tuned."

The Duke Nukem IP will be exploited next month in comic book form with the release of IDW's Duke Nukem: Glorious Bastard, but it sounds like Strauss and company have grander plans than just comics. Take-Two and developer Gearbox at one point had a spin-off, Duke Begins, in the works, a game that was reportedly scrapped amidst lawsuits between the publisher and 3D Realms.

Gearbox is now working on Aliens: Colonial Marines for Sega and Brothers in Arms: Furious 4 for Ubisoft, but they also have other unannounced things up their sleeves.

I'd be willing to give Duke another shot, given a shorter, better directed development cycle in a game that's a little more self-aware and a whole lot better. You?

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick: Our DNA Is Gameplay, Our Clothing Is Cinema [Forbes]

Good evening, Kotaku readers. Is it really Monday already? (*sound of heavy sighing*) Good news! We got an open thread right here where we can share in the pain together!

There's a ton of good links just below, so please, take a look and talk amongst yourselves. This *is* an open thread, so please, go ahead and talk about whatever you'd like, video game related or not.

• Rob Zombie's Woolite commercial - Not bad, but it's the concept that's a winner.
• David Goyer adapting 100 Bullets for Showtime - "Goyer is attached to write and executive produce a drama series project for Showtime based on the Eisner and Harvey Award-winning comic book"
• Dropbox left everyone's accounts wide open on Sunday for hours - No need to wait for the hack!
• Hey! Another Muppets trailer! - This one plays it straight. I'm hooked.
• Miss USA hopefuls weight in the evolution education debate - Watch if you want a headache.

Konami is releasing a special edition version of Gradius-meets-boobs shoot 'em up Otomedius Excellent. It features a bonus rarity for North American retail releases, a two-side pillowcase with busty cartoon girls printed on it, girls that won't protest being drooled upon by you.

For the record, this is what it looks like.

The special edition also packs in an Otomedius art book and soundtrack, which you can see obscuring the titillating artwork emblazoned upon the pillowcase above. Please consider buying it so that Konami will give us another Gradius or, at the very least, another Parodius.

The simpler, game-only version of Otomedius Excellent will retail for $29.99 USD. The Special Edition will be available for $49.99 USD. Both should ship on July 19 on these shores.

Valve's forever updated Team Fortress 2 is rolling out "the biggest, most ambitious update" in the history of the game later this week, the Über Update. Despite its name, it's not solely focusing on TF2's Medic class.

The first part of the Über Update, detailed on the game's official site, is Mafia-related, detailing three new items each for the Heavy (Tomislav, The Eviction Notice, The Family Business) and Spy (The Enforcer, The Big Earner, The Made Man). Also pictured are what may be new hats, though this is still unconfirmed.

There's also a new Payload map. And the game is free for the next week, starting right now-ish.

Perhaps most exciting is the other thing Valve is promising for this Thursday, June 23rd.

* While we believe that a new "Meet the Medic" video short is coming, it's purely based on speculation of the following teaser provided by Valve.

1.) It IS a "Meet the" short.
2.) It involves ONE of the two remaining classes.
3.) It's NOT the Pyro.
4.) It's the MEDIC.

Oh, how I wish Valve would make a real life thinking cap hat so we could figure out what this is!

The Über Update, Day One [TeamFortress]

In this excerpt from his book The Erotic Engine, Patchen Barss talks about one part of the future of pornography and sex on the internet: video games.

Not all virtual environments take the approach of Second Life, which is to rely on emergent sex as an engine of change and creativity. Some virtual sex comes from games' creators rather than the users. Given how ubiquitous sex is in general-interest games, pornographic games intuitively strike one as a natural business opportunity. In reality, though, adult video games are the domain of a very few companies and individuals who are able to invest in an area where the track record is one of limited success (and some spectacular failures).

Video games earned a reputation as entertainment for kids and teenagers. Some people suggest that this association explains why an adult video game industry hasn't sprung up on the same scale as pornographic movies. This can't be the whole story, though. After all, other so-called kids' mediums had X-rated counterparts. Superhero comic books, for example, existed alongside "Tijuana Bibles"-illicitly sold pornographic comics, often featuring unauthorized depictions of celebrities.

Two other factors limit the number of video games made expressly for pornography. First, making a video game is not like making a movie. One guy with a camera can shoot a scene for a porn flick, but a video game demands time and expertise that is not nearly so cheap or common. Producing even a simple
game-even one as simple-minded as Custer's Revenge-requires a major investment. No one can churn out thirteen thousand video games every year the way "the other Hollywood" does with porn movies.

The second limitation brings us right back to the power of the word "you." The effect of being immersed in a video game is qualitatively different from any medium in which the consumer is just a spectator. You don't feel as though you're pushing a button on a controller-you feel like you're blowing up a tank. Translate that into sexuality, particularly acting out sexual fantasies, and you are playing with a power that few companies have been willing or able to harness. Although the explicitly erotic video game sector remains relatively small, it is still a driving force in the field.

One of the few success stories in the adult video game genre is Virtually Jenna. Developed by Thrixxx Technologies (slogan "Simulates what stimulates"), whose Vancouver-based operation is run by Brad Abrams, this game has the advantage of trading on one of the most famous names in pornography, Jenna Jameson. As the eponymous title suggests, the game involves a computer-generated version of Jameson, along with those of many of her "friends." Essentially, the game allows the user to be a porn-film director, setting up virtual scenarios and then playing them out. There are many options for different positions, toys, numbers of partners and so on.

"The challenge," Abrams said, "is that people's imaginations are so extensive that in our role-playing games, even when you do all the animations, create all the scenarios, create content, outfits, you can't match everybody's fantasy."

I asked him whether creating an erotica game had any unique technological demands. It turns out there are many-most centred on disguising the computer-generated aspect of the avatars. "If you take Quake or whatever other kind of [mainstream] game," Abrams said, "those engines are made for running around, shooting, explosions and all that kind of stuff. So when you get down to creating sex, they just don't work. You basically have a lot of different, subtle nuances that you want to try and create. For instance, in those games a character's face isn't really that important. Our eyes twitch and move and gleam and all this kind of stuff. They have a lot of life, because we're trying to create that intimacy. In traditional games, too, you're going to be using a lot of polygons for backgrounds and so your polygon budget is used differently. Our models are about six thousand polys, and so they are a lot higher definition."

Polygons are the basis for many modern video games. They are simple two-dimensional shapes (usually triangles) that are combined into three-dimensional objects like cubes and pyramids. These shapes are called polygonal wireframes, and they can be rotated, stretched and otherwise manipulated to create movement and animation. The more polygons devoted to an object, the more sophisticated and realistic it can become.

"We spend a lot of time on, I don't know what to call it, some kind of boob physics or whatever you want to call it," Abrams said with a laugh. "I have no idea what would be a great name for it, but basically our boobs bounce. There are so many little details that we go into to create a little bit of life in a character which are typically ignored most times in other games."

Do adult video games have no more to contribute to the medium than "jiggle physics" (as Brenda Brathwaite, the author of Sex in Videogames calls it)? Yes, actually. Though adult video games will not likely ever outstrip the graphics innovations of major mainstream game and animation studios, they are contributing more than just convincing pertness. Abrams believes that adult games can improve mainstream games simply by making it okay for sex to be part of the narrative.

"To me, sex and video games is the last frontier in storytelling, because it's been such taboo, because people think video games are for kids. But now the average age of video gamers is twenty-eight years old. In Mass Effect, they have a situation where there's an alien commander and a female commander and they're kind of getting all nice and cosy and it's a cut scene just as they are ready to kiss. And God of War had a scene where this warrior grabs a girl by her hair and shoves her head down into his crotch. Cut scene. You can see it's all there in the storytelling, but they just can't do shit.

"It's always been sort of a goal of mine to get mainstream traction," he said, though that wouldn't be simply in a bid to legitimize his own products. "More just to legitimize the fact that sex in video games and the storytelling experience is a valid part of the whole overall experience."

The battle over this taboo is not restricted to video games. Comic books, movies, television, all have faced public outcry because of sex and violence. A common refrain among those who work in adult industries, though, is that the protests always seem to be much more about sex than violence. Abrams has no patience for it.

"All these people just get out on their high horses and say, ‘Sex in video games: it's evil incarnate.' And I'm going, ‘Okay, well then how come people can go out and blow people's heads off and you can see the blood spatter on the screen and then it dribbles down the screen. It's ultra-realistic, ultra-violent.' And I'm going, ‘That's okay?' "

And, he adds, it's not as though the content of video games is in any way unique. "You read the Old Testament and you see whose cousin is marrying whose cousin and whose half-sister is having that kid, and the adultery and all that shit. Don't come down on video games for having anything new and original. It's all been done before in the Bible." Abrams's feelings carry on the centuries-old tradition of pornographers who are outraged by the hypocrisy they see in their puritanical critics.

But he doesn't expect pornography's technological influence to change people's attitudes. In fact, he says he is "pretty jaded" about the idea of pornographers as early adopters and pioneers of technology. When it comes to improvements in Internet infrastructure, he says that Thrixxx is more of a beneficiary than a driver. "I mean, right now the beauty of the Internet for us is that ten years ago you could have never done this," he said. "Even if the technology was advanced enough to create good sex sims back then, the distribution pipelines weren't in place. We don't need retailers right now; we don't need mainstream distribution. People can find us and buy it, download it and it's a done deal." He says adult producers are now leading the way in marketing and business models. "I think adult is one of the most pure forms of free enterprise I've ever seen. If you have something people want, if it's good enough, people will pay for it. If you don't have something that people want, they don't pay and you're done. The marketing, doing everything online, and payment processing: that is where adult is the strongest. Setting up the pipelines, adult is really strong and good at that." These may seem mundane aspects of communications, but without them, nothing else can develop. People tend to be nervous about giving out their credit card information online-doubly so when the product is taboo. One of the biggest challenges of e-commerce is making customers comfortable with a new way of paying.

"The adult side of the business has actually done a really good job of generating trust from the general consumer," Abrams said. Other people in the industry remain more optimistic about the adult world's capacity to continuing innovating on a technological front as well as a business front. Among those with a cheerier outlook is Jenna Jameson herself. She has heard the pessimistic chatter, but does not buy into it.

"We always hear that the adult technology lead is slowing down," she told me. "Not in my opinion, though, as every time I turn around, this industry is still at the forefront of the next new thing. I think we will continue to see the adult industry spearhead the development and use of technology." Jameson may have more reason to be optimistic than most. Not only is she one of the most successful, famous and rich X-rated stars of all time but she has also become an iconic entrepreneur whose brand has crossed over into mainstream culture. Her autobiography spent six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and she has appeared on billboards in New York's Times Square promoting her website. Her brand includes a line of sex toys produced by Doc Johnson (a company founded by Reuben Sturman of peep-show notoriety) as well as ringtones ("moantones," actually), purses, guitars, perfume and more. She has done commercials for Adidas and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She has attained such celebrity that I was not allowed to contact her directly: my questions and her answers filtered through her handlers. Long before Jameson secured her place as a bona fide mainstream celebrity, the former stripper who graduated from softcore to hard-core, and from stills to film, was already pulling the technological levers that would catapult her to stardom. In those days, though, it was more about survival than getting ahead. "Being in the adult industry means always having to fight: fight with government, media, ISPs or other regulators in both public and private sectors," she said. "In order to survive and deliver what our customers wanted, while working with these restrictions, we had to be better, cleaner and smarter in being able to adapt and constantly look for new and intelligent ways to deliver new media."

Two-thirds of the way through her autobiography, Jameson has a single line about the porn world generally being ahead of the pack technologically. I wanted to know whether she was just repeating a truism, or whether this was something she had actually experienced working in the industry.

"I have seen this throughout my career, especially in the advances in streaming video. Big mainstream studios were always watching what us little adult companies were up to and a perfect example is shown in the adult world bringing video to the web before the rest," she said. "In my business, keeping ahead of the game in technology just made sense so we could satisfy our surfers and customers with new and exciting media. We started off with photos and stories, but to give customers a true experience, the next natural step was to provide video content. Once video was commonplace, the demand was to meet enhanced and higher-quality video requests, and so on." The demand for "more," "better" and "new" never abated. As the push moved beyond video toward more interactive media, the technological demands made by Jameson's fans began to feel more like personal demands.

"Fans never had a forum with which to interact with me before the Internet," she said. "And then, with my participation, they were able to email, chat, submit artwork and send mail directly to my computer in a way that was easier than ever before. They couldn't get enough. The more I made myself available, the more they asked. I had to learn to draw the line in order to keep my personal boundaries intact." In some ways, Jameson was becoming the highly commercialized version of Jennifer Ringley. As lucrative as it might have been, though, there was to be no JennaCam to replace the long since defunct JenniCam. "As I made myself more available on web chats, I had many member requests to install a 24/7 webcam into my bedroom," Jameson said. "That's an area where I had to draw the line."

With Thrixxx's Virtually Jenna, Jameson commercialized another piece of Internet technology that had until that point been a deeply personal aspect of many people's online experience: the avatar. I have described some of the ways people have developed intimate relationships with their own avatars and have built up infrastructures of sex, love and marriage with others through MUDs and modern virtual worlds. Jameson's avatar, though, commodified this intimacy in the form of a pornographic fantasy world in which you could buy, interact with and control the online version of a real person. (Of course, "real" is a tricky concept in this case, as the "real" Jenna Jameson, as with any porn star, is also mostly fantasy.) Given the personal relationship so many people have with their online presence, and Jameson's limits as to how much privacy she will give up, it seemed as though creating a virtual Jenna might be a bit too much for her. She said, though, that other projects have felt more intrusive. "When Doc Johnson approached me to create a full body mould of myself, it was exciting to be at the forefront of this type of interaction, but it took a little bit of getting used to knowing that someone was probably using a mould of my entire body for their pleasure," she said. "When it came around to creating my avatar for VirtuallyJenna.com, not only was it easier but it was exciting to be at the top of this new technology and a lot more fun to be able to make facial expressions and movements that would be linked to my image."

She said having a virtual version of herself feels "kinda like being cloned." In this, she has realized the dream of many a science fiction fan-creating a clone of one's self to do all the work, while the original human being sits back and reaps the rewards. Jenna Jameson confirmed to USMagazine.com in August 2007 that she was "done with porn forever." In one sense that's true-she does not have sex on camera any more. But her virtual counterpart continues to be the main player in thousands of user-generated sex scenes, and the resulting revenue helps feed the $30-million-per-year Club Jenna juggernaut. Usually when people think about having artificial entities to do humanity's work for us, it's in the context of robots, and it usually has to do with manufacturing or the military. But for entertainers-adult and mainstream-virtuality may be where the greatest threats and opportunities lie. Should it become the norm down the road that Hollywood celebrities maintain a virtual version of themselves to build their fan base or entertain the masses, there is a real chance that nobody will remember or acknowledge that this was another technological innovation first proved viable by the pornography industry.

This excerpt comes from The Erotic Engine: How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google, by Patchen Barss (Doubleday). You can pick up a copy of the book via Amazon (it's out already in Canada, and comes out in the US tomorrow).

We'll have plenty of time to scrimp, save and perhaps land a second job to afford the next generation of video game consoles. Avalanche Studios, creators of Just Cause and the forthcoming Renegade Ops, believe 2014 is when we'll get them.

So says David Grijns, the man heading Avalanche's new New York City-based studios. He tells Edge that the developers "have some intelligence to go on that, by early 2014, we're pretty sure there'll be at least one next-generation console on the market." Based on Grijns' wording, that next generation excludes the Wii U, which is expected to be slightly more powerful than the Xbox 360 and PS3.

That release window jibes with information Kotaku has heard, which targeted Sony and Microsoft's next-gen efforts for 2014.

Avalanche's new U.S. studio is working on "large-scale, online-enabled original IP"—so, not that rumored Mad Max game?—for PC and other still unannounced platforms.

Avalanche "pretty sure" of new hardware in 2014 [Edge]

The handful of people making zombie survival horror game Project Zomboid have pulled their game from the Internet, not because they hate that their game is getting pirated. They expected that. They could even live with that, as they had been, quite merrily.

They have pulled their £5 game because, despite their tolerance for piracy, they're now definitely losing money to piracy.

A new pirated version of the game includes an "update" button that, any time it's clicked, forces a new download of the whole thing from the cloud servers that the Zomboid team uses to distribute the game. Each download from that service has to be paid for, by the developers.

On their blog, the game's indie creators explain why this is a potentially costly problem:

Whether piracy actually amounts to lost sales we're not going to get into. The possibility that it raises awareness and promotes the game cannot be ignored, but the difference is offline versions on torrents, which we've been largely unconcerned about, do not cost us real money [emphasis in the original], only potential money, and even then we can't really guess at what the net effect is. Likewise people who download the game through our website only download it when there is a new version, so once every week or so. These new pirate copies have an ‘update now' button which will download the game every time it's clicked, potentially every time the game is run by everyone using it.

They've pulled the game, but are offering a public demo via torrent. Do check it out and consider this an important anecdote for the ongoing arguments about who piracy serves, who it hurts and who it helps.

Sorry we've had to take the game down for the day [Project Zomboid developer blog]

Bowling with Tekken characters is coming to the PlayStation 3 this fall with the release of Tekken Hybrid, the Blu-ray disc bundle that includes one computer animated movie, Tekken: Blood Vengeance, and one PlayStation 2 remake, Tekken Tag Tournament HD.

That PS3 exclusive will both help us wash the foul taste of the live action Tekken movie from our mouths and get us more excited for Tekken Tag Tournament 2, still just an arcade release at this point. To ramp up enthusiasm for even more Tekken over the next year and to hype up Tekken Bowl, Namco Bandai has released dozens of fresh screens from Tekken Hybrid.

There are shots of Tekken Bowl, stills from Blood Vengeance, a selection of detailed character renders and even a few shots of Tekken Tag in the gallery above. Who's excited?!