Palmer Luckey

“There are times, especially when I was just getting into PC gaming, where I spent way less time playing than obsessing about the quality of the play.”

“Don't be afraid to convince yourself that your business is incredible, but don't expect others to be convinced without solid data to back it up. Ideas can be a worth a lot, but they are usually not. Execution is everything.”

“VR is going to become something mainstream, but it's not going to happen right away. You just don't have the horsepower to make it happen on a device, much less a cheap enough and comfortable enough device that a normal consumer is going to want to have.”

“VR is going to be defined by the content that is designed explicitly for virtual reality.”

“I was interested in virtual reality for several years even before working at USC, it wasn't an interest that started there at all. In fact, when I started working at USC, I already had prototypes of the Rift that were very similar to the final design.”

“I wanted to play games in the best way possible, a way that was better than anyone else would have access to. As time went on, it became clear that VR was actually feasible on a large scale at a low cost, and at a quality far beyond what I had been hoping for.”

“Focus comes a lot more easily when you desperately want the results of your own work - nobody else is going to do it for you.”

“I'm a huge fan of online communities. I think that asynchronous internet-based communication forums such as Reddit and other discussion forums are one of the best things that could possibly have happened to collaborative invention. The Rift certainly would not exist without forums.”

“As a PC gaming enthusiast, a significant chunk of my time and money was spent building and upgrading my rig, always in pursuit of a better gaming experience. At some point, I decided to take a look past my three 3D monitors and figure out what the absolute best theoretical gaming setup would be.”

“Virtual reality is a tough sell for a software developer. They have to convince investors that not only are they going to build a good game, which is what they normally have to do, they have to convince them that it's going to be a good game and that virtual reality will be successful.”

“I'm the most optimistic guy about VR out there. I have crazy visions of what we'll be doing in the future.”

“I don't think that VR is going to lead to humanity being enslaved in the matrix or letting the world crumble around us. I think it's going to end up being a great technology that brings closer people together, that allows for better communication, that reduces a lot of environmental waste that we're currently doing in the real world.”

“Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.”