New John Carmack Interview

http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6318725/e3-2011-john-carmack-talks-wii-u-playstation-vita-and-next-gen-rage

by shawndumas • 15 years ago

122 30 15 years ago

e3.gamespot.com

evanwalsh• 15 years ago

Whenever I read stuff from him (especially his tweets), I feel like he's on a whole different level than the programmers I usually see.

Incredible.

partisan• 15 years ago

He is definitely on a different level. He is like a superstar athlete at the top of his game. I expect Rage to be a hit because of the passion that John Carmack is investing in it.

ShardPhoenix• 15 years ago

Maybe, but good programming is not the same thing as good gameplay design.

ecaradec• 15 years ago

He is very nice to listen to as well. You can find some podcast here and there. I'd wish he talks more often, but he has better to do of course ;)

digitalbanana• 15 years ago

here's a small video interview (game industry focused)from this year e3: http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2011-a-word-with-john-carmack/17...

zmonkeyz• 15 years ago

I'm glad I was around to read the .plan files back in the quake days.

michaeldhopkins• 15 years ago

I would like to see 37signals put this in their next Exit Interview roundup:

"GS: When id was bought by ZeniMax in 2009, you basically said that it felt like id was becoming its own publisher. Now that you're about to ship Rage, do you guys still feel that way?

JC: It's been better than I could have expected. On a personal level, I don't have to pretend to be an executive anymore. I don't have to go to board of directors meetings or talk about board strategy things. So, I've actually gotten to program more in the last year and a half than I did the year and a half before that.

So, it's been personally good there. And one of the things that was really unexpectedly pleasant is being part of a larger family. In December, we have this big get-together where everybody shows the games in the theaters and talks about everything. And there was this sort of unexpectedly pleasant sense that this is really nice to be part of a larger family and to be able to cheer for somebody else's effort. It's awesome being a sister to [The Elder Scrolls V] Skyrim on there. So, I don't have a negative thing at all to say about how it's gone. I couldn't be happier."

shawndumas• 15 years ago

"GS: [D]id you get a chance to look at the PlayStation Vita at all?

JC: No, but I think that Sony learned a lot from the PS3, and they've gone out of their way to make sure that the development is as easy as possible on there. However, I wouldn't want to be the executive making the decision to launch a new portable gaming machine in the post-smartphone world. I think that they've picked as eminently a suitable hardware spec as they could for that. They're going to have you program for it like a console, so it's going to seem twice as powerful as a smartphone with the exact same chips in there.

But of course, by the time they actually ship, there may be smartphones or these tablets with twice as much power as what they're shipping with on there. And a year or two after that, it's going to look pretty pokey."

Hawramani• 15 years ago

Couldn't Sony do something like the iPhone? The device could get a refresh every year or every six months, while all of the games would keep working on it.

daeken• 15 years ago

The huge perk to console development is having a fixed set of hardware for a long period of time. You can build up technology, learn the ins and outs of optimizing on it, and build the best software possible. That's how people did crazy things with the PSX by the end of its lifecycle, same with the PS2, Xbox, etc. The longer you've been working on something, the better you're going to be with it. Switching to a short console lifecycle -- even if it's forwards-compatible -- nullifies almost the entire set of benefits to console development.

antrix• 15 years ago

Like the Xperia Play? http://www.sonyericsson.com/mwcnews/xperia_play/

kenjackson• 15 years ago

But, the data certainly isn't showing AAA doing well on iOS.

That was an interesting statement I thought.

ido• 15 years ago

You have to remember what the meaning of "doing well" there is:

    They want the AAA titles that are going to go out 
    in many, many millions of units. And I'm like, 
    "Hey, we made a half a million dollars here, a 
    half a million dollars there, it pays everybody's
    salaries"

His "not doing well" would be my huge success!

programminggeek2• 15 years ago

John Carmack is equally brilliant and lucky in the same way that Michael Jordan is/was. Both found their life's work at a very young age and pursued it relentlessly. Because they found what they love so young and had such incredible work ethics, they achieved incredible things that put most mere mortals to shame.

Natural talent was obviously a factor, but so was the hard work and practice that they got at ages much younger than most of their peers. Both JC and MJ spent their teens practicing when others were playing. It wasn't forced, it was what they wanted to do.

I learned to code pretty much the same way. I'm no John Carmack, but when my peers entered college and were just starting to learn Java, I had been building games and weird little projects in C++ and Java for like 6 years. I naturally had an edge after that.

Finding what you love to do early in life and practicing that like crazy is a rare and wonderful thing.

Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, John Carmack, Michael Jordan, Eminem, Metallica, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Wozniak, all seem to have this kind of thing in common.

InnocentB• 15 years ago

This is basically Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, distilled to five paragraphs. Very nice.

jasonwatkinspdx• 15 years ago

Which perhaps says something about the book.

brianobush• 15 years ago

10k hours - the amount of time proposed that it takes to master a craft.

FrojoS• 15 years ago

How do you define mastery of a craft?

Jobs e.g. certainly had put in >10k in developing and selling electronic devices when he founded NeXT. But I'd argue it took him a couple more years to become as good and successful as he is now. Another example is Johann Sebastian Bach. Many think, that his last work was his best.

jhamburger• 15 years ago

It amazes me that the guy who created the PC games of my childhood is only 10 years older than me.

jacques_chester2• 15 years ago

It seems that even John "my hobby is rocket science" Carmack is beginning to fail at scale. He mentions that he can't say "let's rewrite this from scratch" any more.

Also interesting is the contrast with 3DRealms. Whereas Broussard simply ran out of money, Carmack saw the writing on the wall and sold id before Rage sunk them.

georgemcbay2• 15 years ago

It isn't so much that he fails at scale as it is that at this point, the majority of effort that goes into any big game is in the content/art and not in the code.

The reason he can't say "let's rewrite this from scratch" anymore is partly because of the size/complexity of the code, but a lot more because he can't make any sudden changes that will cause the artists to have to restructure their existing work significantly... that's where the scale failure occurs.

jacques_chester2• 15 years ago

That's not what I got from it, but it does make sense. Coordination costs suck.

baby• 15 years ago

Pardon me if I'm wrong but, they limited the game (number of monsters on screen) to be able to run 60fps on console. So they do make compromise for PC gaming just because they have to work about the console version also.

I guess the good news in that is that they will work for doom4 to run in30fps on console.

New John Carmack Interview

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