Sad news folks - id games have confirmed to Eurogamer that 'Quake Arena' for the Xbox Live Arcade has been canned in favor of the upcoming Quake Live project for PC.

Initially being worked on by Pi Studios out in Texas, the game was meant to be a straight up port of the original Quake III Arena and Team Arena packs to the XBLA for huge multiplayer fraggin' fun. However id had 3 separate projects based on the same idea - Quake XBLA, Quake Live, a free browser based version of Quake Arena, as well as a Quake Arena DS port.

John Carmack told Eurogamer that "right now the publishers aren't all that interested in a multiplayer-focused game on there". Which is kind of interesting, considered that the best sellers all tend to have some sort of online play in it.

Right now Pi Studios are working with Raven Software with the upcoming Next-gen 'Wolfenstein' title. One might also be suspicious that the game was canned because id and Activision, outside of Wolfenstein, have split apart - now with id working with EA for the release of their titles. That may have also caused the canning of the game.

It's a shame too - I was a huge fan of Quake Arena on the PC back in 1999. I played it far too much. Whether Quake Live can pull me away from Team Fortress 2 (Nearing 100 hours of Engineer play alone...) is unknown at this time.

I'd still love to see more classic Id titles for Xbox Live Arcade. If 'Portal' cab make it on, surely a lovely port of 'Quake 2', 'Quake 1', or a 'Commander Keen' collection would do very nicely.

Source: Eurogamer: Next-gen Quake Arena game shelved