We got a fresh glimpse of the new RAGE game at this years Quakecon.

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John Carmack was quoted as saying that the new Rage Game is still a ways away but that he has been devoting most of his time developing it.

He told fans at Quakecon that Rage will be released “When it’s fun and when it’s done. “

When asked about his thoughts on user created content Matt said:“As a game player, I love it. But that doesn’t mean at the same time I can’t love a BioShock or a Call of Duty 4. You can have a focused game, and do that really well. I think that’s the important thing”

Matt has told Next-Gen in a recent interview that they have brought in top notch AI designers and AI programmers to help develop their latest creation “our gameplay goals for Rage are so much more than we’ve ever had before, that if you don’t have an AI designer working with an AI programmer, then you’re just going to be in bad shape.”

Rage is being developed for PC, Mac, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Rage is expected to launch sometime in 2009.

In late May id Software announced that it had opted not to renew its membership with the ESA, following in the footsteps of Activision, Vivendi and LucasArts.

However, id chief executive Hollenshead told the Washington Post that the firm’s exit from the organization was a business decision, not a political one, and labeled the ESA “a credit to the industry”.

“Our departure from ESA is probably temporary and was not political,” he said. “It was just a question of other priorities this year that we wanted to focus on.”

While the ESA still has 24 members, Hal Halpin, head of the Entertainment Consumers Association, expects more to leave.

“It’s really concerning for all of us. Anyone who cares about the games business should be concerned about what’s going on with the ESA,” he said.

However, ESA president Michael Gallagher played down the recent member exits.

“There are hundreds of trade associations in Washington and virtually all feature member turnover and the ESA is no exception,” he said.

Rage Trailer

GI: What can you say about Rage? When everyone saw the shakey-cam footage people were wondering if you were making a racing game….

Carmack: It’s about 50/50 racing and first person action. It’s interesting. If we go back post Doom 3, we started making a completely different game. It’s internal name was The Darkness, which it’s obvious that someone else has taken since then (laughs) but it was going to be another spooky dark survival horror thing set on an island. We spent a lot of time going on that. But we reached this point where, “Do we really need to do another dark, spooky game?” id always gets slammed for the game is always too dark. Maybe we should do another game that’s a little brighter. We can branch out a bit more. Maybe it would be more fun to run over people with pick up trucks and ATVs. We rebooted our entire development project. We were reasonably far into production on The Darkness title and we just said we wanted to go in a completely different direction. We wound up with this post-apocalyptic Road Warrior type thing.

Read the whole interview here.

Rage will have elements of racing, adventure and action in what appears to be a Mad Maxesque post apocalyptic world. Details so far are sketchy, all we know is that the main character will be in a struggle against an oppressive “machine”, and as always it’s your job to sort them out. From the media released so far it seems that racing will play a large part in the game.

Rage will be release simultaneously on the PC, Mac, PS3 and Xbox360. As always the current release date is “Done when its done”.