While confirming that the next Quake is not in development, Carmack told Eurogamer there are "strong factions" within the US developer that want to create another game in the seminal first-person shooter series. And discussions are pointing towards going back to the first game's quirky roots.

"Nothing is scheduled here, people are not building this," Carmack said.

"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.

"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 we could do something pretty grand like that, that still tweaks the memory right in all of those ways, but is actually cohesive and plays with all of the strengths of the level we're at right now."