Quake is big - one of the cornerstones of modern gaming culture in fact. World of Warcraft is big too, though it's role in the cultural gaming hierarchy would perhaps be closest to Treasurer. Surely the two could be married then to create an unstoppable powerhouse of addiction and high-speed action? Wouldn't a Quake MMO be awesome beyond belief?

"No," says id Software's Technical Director and Quake creator John Carmack.

In an interview published this week over at Shacknews Carmack discusses how many publishers have made offers to the influential Texas-based developer to create a Quake MMO, but that he has quashed such attempts everytime.

"id has no interest in MMO development," said Carmack bluntly.

Carmack is recognised as a pioneer in a number of technological fields, having created techniques such as adaptive tile refreshing, raycasting, surface caching and Carmack's Reverse. Though the games programmer says he is full aware of the MMO genre and the technologies involved in it, he is firm that id Software has no plans to explore it.

Instead, id Software is currently hard at work on a number of different projects such as Rage, a browser-based adaptation of the original Quake and a new Wolfenstein game.

Think that Carmack is missing a trick, or are you confident that a Quake MMO would just be more pants than an underwear store? Let us know what you reckon in the forums.