John Carmack Quotes (26 Quotes)

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.

Its gotten a little slower this last year since I got a little baby. I lost my Sundays.

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.

We are working internally on a completely new project, but we haven't made any firm plans yet for the future of the Wolf, Doom and Quake franchises. I would enjoy doing a DS or PSP game, but at this point I can't imagine having the time to be seriously involved in it.

I'd rather see a park than a prison or homes. I particularly don't want the access. It does change the character of the community.

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.

anywhere close to taking full advantage of all of this extra capability. But, maybe by the time the next generation of consoles roll around the developers will be a little more comfortable with all this and be able to get more benefit out of it. It's not a problem I actually think will have a solution. I think it's going to stay hard.

It wasn't too many years ago when we were lucky to have three triangles for a nose on our characters. Now we've got pores and moles.

Think of what we, and others, are doing as building the largest roller coaster in the world. Rocket science is mythologized out of whack with its difficulty. Nine out of 10 people will fail, but one of us will eventually get through.

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

I recognize that I possess a very special intellect, but at the same time, I recognize that I'm lacking in a lot of areas. But being well-rounded is greatly overrated.

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.

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

Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.

This was her rather crafty ploy to make sure that we pay a whole lot of attention to safety. It would be one thing for Russ to break a leg in an accident. It would be a completely different thing to break one of Anna's legs,

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.

I'd rather have a search engine or a compiler on a deserted island than a game.

We really, really want to get it done in the next two years,

The speed of light sucks.

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.

I'm usually so focused on the here and now and the soon to be that thinking about what I've done in the past just doesn't occupy much time. But when I do look back over everything, I am quietly proud of all that I've been able to accomplish and all the enjoyment I've been able to let people have with the games that we've created.

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.

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

Hardware wise, there's a lot of marketing hype about the consoles. A lot of it really needs to be taken with grains of salt about exactly how powerful it is, ... The Xbox 360 has an architecture where you essentially have got three processors and they're all running the same memory pool and they're all synchronized, and cache coherent, and you can spawn off another thread in your program and make it go do some work. That's kind of the best case and it's still really difficult to turn into faster performance or getting it to get more stuff done in a game title.

Sony sort of takes this position where, they say 'Okay, it's going to be difficult, maybe its going to suck to do this, but the good game developers are going to suck it up and make it work.' There's some truth to that, ... There will be the developers that go ahead and have a miserable time and do get good performance out of some of these multi-core approaches. And Cell is worse than others in some respects, here.

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.