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John Carmack Archive – Interviews [pdf]

by Arjuna on 6/29/17, 4:45 PM with 61 comments

  • by Arjuna on 6/29/17, 5:25 PM

    I found these insights interesting:

    "I know that most people won't believe it, but a 100x increase in income really didn't have that big of an impact on me as a person. It is certainly nice to be in a position where people can't exert any leverage on you, but it's definitely not the primary focus of my life. I get to drive a Ferrari in to work, but my day to day life is almost exactly the same as it was eight years ago. I get up, go in to work, hopefully do some good stuff, then go home. I'm still happy." [1]

    [...]

    "I feel bad for some companies out there. The founders, who are these incredible engineers, are now directors of their departments doing management rather than engineering. At the same time most of the people they are managing are nowhere near as good as they were at doing the actual work. That's what I hope never happens to me. I want to stay in the trenches working on the things all the time. There is some benefit to sitting back, reading and researching and getting some broader scope on it. But if you're divorced from the low level nuts and bolts of things, like how this actually applies to the real world, then you're just an academic. You get these huge disconnects between what an academic can do and what somebody in production can do." [2]

    [1] Page 77

    [2] Page 89

  • by thiagoharry on 6/29/17, 11:32 PM

    I liked this:

    CARMACK: - The intersection of people that run Quake on Linux, SPARC and Light is probably a dozen people. But if it's just a matter of compiling, we'll do it anyway.

    HOOK: -And we do this, not because it makes any particularly good business sense, but because it's cool. All this is an ego thing. The more platforms you port to, the more people are playing your game. And its a cool thing that someone can say: "Yeah, I was playing Quake 2 on a SPARC Linux Box."

    CARMACK: - It doesn't make good business case, but it helps us to be better programmers.

  • by j_s on 6/29/17, 7:01 PM

    The DRM-free "Masters of Doom" audiobook is currently (expires July 10-ish) included in the "Hackers, Gamers & Geeks" Humble Books Bundle for $15, along with a bunch of other video game history audiobooks, including "Prepare to Meet Thy Doom: And More True Gaming Stories" also by by David Kushner at the $8 level.

    https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hackers-gamers-geeks-audi...

  • by zurn on 6/29/17, 5:34 PM

    Actual link: http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-interviews.pdf...

    And it's press interviewing Carmack, not job interviews conducted by him.

  • by typedef_struct on 6/29/17, 8:08 PM

    > As far as unreal goes, we can’t compete with an unreleased product, because a non existent product does everything you dream of and has no faults

    Oh, Star Citizen...

  • by quakeguy on 6/30/17, 5:59 AM

    This is what Quake looks like today:

    https://twitter.com/SimsOCallaghan/status/875934261320220672

    (Yes, it is Quake1 in a modified OGL engine)

  • by blinkingled on 6/29/17, 6:29 PM

    > John Carmack: You wind up getting this sense of partisanship or just taking sides. It’s human nature, I suppose, but when it gets away from a strict technical discussion, then you start getting your ”army of followers.” I suppose that’s part of having influence, but it’s not a part that I’m particularly comfortable with.

    This is so pervasive (politics, technology) and damaging (less so in technical world but there's still the price of stunted intelligence to pay) that I wish along with me more people in the world would read this and pledge to making every discussion interesting and productive.

  • by pjmlp on 6/30/17, 9:09 AM

    How professional game developers, like Carmack with his OpenGL love, actually see the whole relevance of graphic APIs.

    "John Carmack: Its still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. Its interesting how little of the technology cares what API you're using and what generation of the technology you're on. You've got a small handful of files that care about what API they're on, and millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they're on."

  • by thrillgore on 6/29/17, 6:05 PM

    While not directly linked, this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OipJYWhMi3k) about Quake got my attention last night and I found it riveting regarding its technical aspects, development history, and cultural impact.
  • by pfarnsworth on 6/30/17, 6:29 AM

    John Carmack was my programming god, back in the day. I would devour everything he wrote, which if I remember correctly, was on Usenet, but I'm so old my memory fails me now. Recently I found out that one of my friends was working with him at Oculus via Facebook, I was jealous beyond belief.
  • by kchoudhu on 6/30/17, 7:44 AM

    Carmack on Java: "I like the language"

    Your move, language hipsters.

  • by paines on 6/30/17, 4:44 AM

    It sounds like he is a development machine, in a good sense. I wonder if he has ever blocks, like mental or creativity ...
  • by fredsanford on 6/29/17, 10:13 PM

    Has it really been ~9 years since Carmack did a technical/game dev type of interview?

    Time is just flying past...

  • by teilo on 6/29/17, 5:45 PM

    Drinking game time. A shot for every "when it's done."
  • by kodt on 6/29/17, 6:08 PM

    Team5150 the old Tribes clan?
  • by nadim on 6/29/17, 7:25 PM

    Gold+. Thx for posting.
  • by dang on 6/29/17, 6:00 PM

    Url changed from https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/880204928811126784, which points to this.
  • by 1001101 on 6/29/17, 6:06 PM

    [PDF] decorator would be appreciated.