Hot on the heels of the news that EA will be the publisher for id’s exciting new shooter Rage, famed id boss John Carmack has admitted that until recently he saw EA as an “evil empire”.

Speaking to GameSpot, he explained: "As we moved out with a new title and a new franchise for us, we shopped it around to all the major publishers.

“In fact, we've done it a couple times – we're in the enviable position of having been able to fund the title ourselves. We were able to retire a lot of the risk to the publishers.

"I'll admit that, if you asked me years ago, I still had thoughts that EA was the Evil Empire, the company that crushes the small studios. I'd have been surprised, if you told me a year ago that we'd end up with EA as a publisher.

"When we went out and talked to people, especially EA Partners people like Valve, we got almost uniformly positive responses from them."