Words matter. These are the best John Carmack Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
I’ve never been one of those programmers that works effectively on short amounts of sleep. I’ve always needed eight hours.
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?
I’ve said before that I’m a remarkably unsentimental person.
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.
Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.
Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you. I’m happy to share what I can, because I’m in it for the love of programming.
It’s been great that every title that we’ve done internally has been a huge success, but when you’ve got 50 or 100 people on there, all their families and everyone counting on you there, the idea of ‘What if you screw up once?’ or ‘What if the market changes?’
I did take some value out of looking at the extreme simplicity of implementation that the tight resource limits required. I do feel that modern games are often abstracted a lot more than is really necessary, and it leads to robustness issues.
A strong team can take any crazy vision and turn it into reality.
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.
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.
There are some things that are exciting for distributors. I love Apple’s AppStore and the things people can do with digital distribution.
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.
The speed of light sucks.
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.
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 great games are the space sims and driving sims and these experiences where you’re basically sitting at a table with nothing happening in front of you. A lot of interesting things are evolving there. There are great games that can be made.
Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.
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.
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.
Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.
