"We went from the 2 and the Quake 4 Strogg universe," Carmack said. "We are 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."

The original Quake is credited with advancing the first-person shooter from the 2.5D of games such as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood into the third dimension, with realistically-designed levels, polygonal characters as opposed to sprites and many mechanics which we take for granted today, such as rocket jumping and all shooters being brown. But also, without Quake, we'd have no Half-Life or Team Fortress. Think about the consequences of that for a minute.

Whether or not id is going to work on Quake 5, it won't be for a while yet -- they've got Rage (due out in October) to finish first, followed by Doom 4. But after that? Maybe. The interest is certainly there from the developers.