John Carmack Quotes

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.

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.

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

Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.

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

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.

The speed of light sucks.

If you're willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better

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

If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

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.

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

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

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

Focused, hard work is the real key to success.

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!

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.

Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn't as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process.

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.

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.

It's a good thing Doom 3 is selling very well.

An interesting question: is it easier to motivate a learned individual that never does anything, or educate an ignorant individual that actually produces things?

You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.

I wanted to remain a technical adviser for Id, but it just didn't work out. Probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging.

I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do.