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. – John Carmack
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. – John Carmack
The cornerstone of our Tech 5 development platform is this uniquely textured map or world, where every surface doesn’t have a repeating texture on it. It can all be stamped and modified due to the work done on it. The core technical question to be resolved on this was how do we get that media set to be playable on the iPhone. – John Carmack
With ZeniMax, they have a lot to be proud of. ‘Fallout 3’ is one of the favorite games of so many of our people. But they had zero overlap with the things we do. We do the best shooters in the world. It’s a perfect hand and glove fit. We started talking about this before they rolled out ‘Fallout 3’. We watch them roll it out worldwide. – John Carmack
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. – John Carmack
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. – John Carmack
The core of what I do is solve problems, whether that’s in graphic engine flow or rockets. I like working on things that are going to have an impact one way or the other. – John Carmack
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. – John Carmack
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. – John Carmack
Because of the nature of Moore’s law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later. – John Carmack
I am greatly proud of the fact that ‘Doom’ is one of those things where everything that has a 32-bit processor has had ‘Doom’ run on it, and I think that’s been one of the great aspects of having it be open source: having everything out there means that people have maintained that and kept it up to date. – John Carmack
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. – John Carmack
I really do think VR is now one of the most exciting things that can be done in this whole sector of consumer electronic entertainment stuff. – John Carmack
I think that first-person shooter is a stable genre that’s going to be here forever, just like there are going to be driving games forever. There’s something just intrinsically rewarding about turning around a corner and shooting at something. – John Carmack
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. – John Carmack
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. – John Carmack
There are some things that are exciting for distributors. I love Apple’s AppStore and the things people can do with digital distribution. – John Carmack