John Carmack

Scientist

1970-08-20

Quotes by John Carmack

• The speed of light sucks.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Obviously, virtual reality is where I've placed my bet about the future and where the excitement is going. At this point, I could say it's almost a lock. It's going to be magical - it is magical - and great things are coming from that. Along the way, I was focused on the first-person shooters. I said we should go do something on mobile.

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• 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?'

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• 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.

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• 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.

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