id Software mastermind John Carmack says that the next Quake – if it happens – could be very much like the first Quake.
The Quake franchise is a funny one. The original game was a mish-mash of nearly random levels and enemies held together by one of the flimsiest excuses for a story ever conceived. Quake 2 chucked all that out in favor of a more cohesive tale about a war with the menacing alien Strogg, while Quake 3: Arena flushed the story, and single-player, out the window entirely in favor of straight-up online combat. Quake 4, the last in the series, brought back the Strogg invasion, following directly on the tail of Quake 2.
And now it sounds like Quake 5 – which, for the record, is not currently in the works – could end up looking a lot like Quake 1. “We went from the Quake 2 and the Quake 4 Strogg universe. We are at least tossing around the possibilities of going back to the bizarre, mixed up Cthulhu-ish Quake 1 world and rebooting that direction,” Carmack told Eurogamer. “We think that would be a more interesting direction than doing more Strogg stuff after Quake 4. We certainly have strong factions internally that want to go do this.”
But Carmack also acknowledged that memories of Quake, which is 15 years old and heralded a technological revolution in gaming, have probably been filtered by the passage of time. “The way I think about some of those things, and I actually get into arguments with my wife about this, who loved the original Quake game, I looked at the original Quake as this random thing, because we really didn’t have our act together very well,” he continued. “But because it was so seminal about the 3D world and the internet gaming, it’s imprinted on so many people. It made such an impact in so many ways. Memory cuts us a lot of slack.”
id’s current project is Rage, which is due out on October 4 for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
