Listen carefully. Go on. Listen. Really concentrate. Hear it?

The curious sound you can detect floating across the breeze is that of the world's PC hardware vendors wringing their hands with glee at today's news from id Software. You see it turns out that the House of Doom has got a brand new franchise on the way, and once again, John "Gaze upon my minimum spec and weep" Carmack is at the helm. At the moment there are no details other than the project's existence (Anyone willing to take my bet that it's an FPS? No?), but Id honcho Todd Hollenshead had this to say to GamesIndustry.biz : 

"We are working on an all-new franchise: it's not Doom, it's not Quake, it's not Wolfenstein, it's not Enemy Territory, it's not even Commander Keen!"

(Editor's note: Damn.)

 "It is a new id brand with an all-new John Carmack engine and I think that when we show it to people, once again they'll see, just like they saw when we first showed Doom 3, that John Carmack still has a lot of magic left.

Our first task at id is as a single studio developer. That's really where everything spawns from. Because John Carmack is a programming genius, who in my opinion is unequalled in video games today, he makes a great technology that we can use across a wide range of applications and different games within our suite of franchises.

The new stuff that we're working on does have a brand new engine that John has been working on, actually is still working on today. We can’t really talk any details about it; we'll see about when the timing is right for an announcement. We like to be able to talk about stuff that we can show at the same time and it's not really ready to show yet."

All joking apart, this is probably going to be good news. While id's in-house game design has made some of their big releases more impressive as extended tech demos than games in the past (Doom 3, I'm looking at you!), once that tech's been franchised out to other developers, we've often seen some fantastic results (Quake 4 and Quake Wars, take a bow, I'm now looking at you.). 

More news as we get it. Until then, start fashioning weapons and collecting together supplies. It looks like we might soon be in for a repeat of the great upgrade frenzy of 2004 ...