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.”

“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.”

“Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.”

“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.”

“Oculus really started popularizing a new approach using cellphone screen technology, a wide field of view, and super-low-latency sensor tracking. It's not crappy stuff that doesn't work and makes everybody sick. When you experience Oculus technology, it's like getting religion on contact. People that try it walk out a believer.”

“It's nice to be able to, you know, for me to be able to personally do whatever the heck I feel like, whether I think that I can justify it exactly in business concerns or not.”

“I've said before that I'm a remarkably unsentimental person.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“At its very core, virtual reality is about being freed from the limitations of actual reality. Carrying your virtual reality with you, and being able to jump into it whenever and wherever you want, qualitatively changes the experience for the better. Experiencing mobile VR is like when you first tried a decent desktop VR experience.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”