John Carmack

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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 industries - look at this stuff. The gears are turning in their head almost immediately about how they can use it as a new medium.”

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

“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.”

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

“A lot of the work at Oculus has gone into working out better position tracking.”

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

“The speed of light sucks.”

“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.”

“One of the reasons microcomputers progressed so fast is people are willing to accept crashes. It's faster to build something and try it, even if it means you'll have to rebuild later... If you spent too much time building and massaging one vehicle, you don't learn anything.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”