Top 30 John Carmack Quotes

Everybody’s saturated with the marketing hype of next-generation consoles. They are wonderful, but the truth is that they are as powerful as a high end PC is right now.

To the game code, the world is still just a tile map, but for rendering, each map was exported as a general-purpose 3D model, and the artists could then go through it and spend the polygons any way they liked, without the limits of line-of-constant-z software rasterization that we lived with on the mobile phones.

We were doing mobile games before the iPhone. We were doing free-to-play with ‘Quake Live.’ We wanted to do massively multiplayer stuff in the early days but didn’t have the resources to do it.

At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can’t win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.

To this day, I run into people all the time that say, whether it was ‘Doom‘, or maybe even more so ‘Quake’ later on, that that openness and that ability to get into the guts of things was what got them into the industry or into technology.

If it weren’t for Moore‘s law changing the playing field continuously, I would have been long gone. The rapid pace of hardware evolution still keeps things fresh for me.

When people heard id Software’s being acquired, everybody just assumed it would be Activision or EA. Why would we even consider going with a publisher that wasn’t of that same size?

A strong team can take any crazy vision and turn it into reality.

Oculus version three or five or whatever it ends up being is something that can be used unplugged – we’d have our own Android stuff and all that – but you could plug it into the PC and use that.

When it became clear that I wasn’t going to have the opportunity to do any work on VR while at id software, I decided to not renew my contract.

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.

The cost of adding a feature isn’t just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. The trick is to pick the features that don’t fight each other.

The speed of light sucks.

I don’t think anyone is going to say great things about being a native developer on Android.

There is absolutely zero doubt that you can technically do an excellent full-featured FPS game, because these devices are more powerful now than, like, a previous generation Xbox.

It is clearly a bad idea to try to just move games from other platforms directly over, but I’m sure we will see a lot of it, especially as the handsets surpass the hardware capabilities of previous generation consoles.

I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and Internet play, game mods, and so on.

With ‘Rage,’ it was a little bit different because this was going to be the public‘s first interaction with the ‘Rage’ IP. Early on, right after the tech demo, there was some marked concern internally how much of a bad thing it would be if the game went out and it wasn’t well released and people got a bad taste off it.

The Xbox 360 is the first console that I’ve ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we’ve had on PC.

After the acquisition of id by Zenimax, we had sort of taken the mobile platform team down to a skeleton crew. We were left with about two people who were finishing up the previous obligations on that. The rest had just been dispersed and absorbed by the other teams in the company.

It really feels like VR has the possibility to be something really huge.

It is true that the gameplay for ‘Orcs&Elves‘ was designed around the limitations of mobile phones, and that if we were starting completely from scratch for the DS, we would probably do things a bit differently, but the bottom line is that when we sit a random DS player down with the game, they have a lot of fun.

I consider myself a remarkably unsentimental person. I don’t look back on the good old days.

One of the things we joke about in the FPS development is it’s so hard to get the player to actually bother to look at all the cool stuff you’ve been doing. You spend a lot of time making really cool things, and usually the player isn’t looking where you want them to.

We were happy with funding ‘Rage’ on our own nickel for years. We intended to do the same with ‘Doom 4’. We had offers early on for ‘Rage’. People offered us X million dollars. But we carried the risk, and when we finally signed a deal, it was X plus $10 million.

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

Low-level programming is good for the programmer‘s soul.

Being able to work on a more constrained project now and then is rewarding in a lot of ways, and of the available small platforms, I think that the iOS platform is clearly the best.

High-end BREW phones aren’t nearly as limited a gaming platform as you might think – they are a lot more powerful than an original Play Station, for example. Java phones, however, are saddled with a huge disadvantage for gaming.

It was great for me to go through all of my crazy Ferraris in my twenties. I think it was an inoculation against any kind of a midlife crisis.