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.”

“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 t...”

“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 abo...”

“Obviously, virtual reality is where I've placed my bet about the future and where the excitement is going. At this point, I could say it's almost a lock. It's going to be magical - it is mag...”

“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 stereoscopic panoramic videos that we're showing on Samsung VR are getting a lot of positive traction. It's exciting when you see creative types - whether from the music, film, or video...”

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

“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.”

“I think 'World of Warcraft' shows that people today still like a good fantasy hack and slash game. I always thought that a lot of computer fantasy games leapt into complex party-based play s...”

“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.”

“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 obligatio...”

“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 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...”

“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.”

“Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.”

“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 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 thin...”

“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...”

“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.”

“I've never been one of those programmers that works effectively on short amounts of sleep. I've always needed eight hours.”