Quotes from John Carmack

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

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

We were happy with funding 'Rage' on our own nickel for years. We intended to do the same with 'Doom 4'. We had offers early on for 'Rage'. People offered us X million dollars. But we carried the risk, and when we finally signed a deal, it was X plus $10 million.

The great games are the space sims and driving sims and these experiences where you're basically sitting at a table with nothing happening in front of you. A lot of interesting things are evolving there. There are great games that can be made.

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.

Developing games for the PC and consoles is all about everything and the kitchen sink. In many ways, you don't have design decisions to make. You do it all. So I enjoy going back to making decisions about what's important as I'm working on a game.

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'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.

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.

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

It is difficult to make good scalable use of a CPU like you can of a graphics card. You certainly don't want 'better or worse' physics or AI in your game

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 any way they liked, without the limits of line-of-constant-z software rasterization that we lived with on the mobile phones.

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.

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?

There are some things that are exciting for distributors. I love Apple's AppStore and the things people can do with digital distribution.

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.

It's nice to have a game that sells a million copies.

There is absolutely zero doubt that you can technically do an excellent full-featured FPS game, because these devices are more powerful now than, like, a previous generation Xbox.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.