John Carmack Quotes

Every time I make a new game, I put all of my effort completely into that game. It's like putting all your effort into a new child that's being born. Once the project is done, I can step back and look at it objectively, which is when I can see a lot of flaws. That's when I start to make a new game that tries to fix some of those flaws.

Making a website is similar to making a movie-hundreds of people work on it, one person makes the final decision, and they make them every minute of the day.

I'm a game designer, so I care about the whole experience.

We do not focus test our games and never had. People ask why we don't, and I say, 'I have so many opinions in this studio, I don't need anymore!' We really debate everything - and it's a good debate. That's why the games turn out well: it's not me - it's not this guy - it's the collective. Together, we figure out what we want.

I like to shoot a lot of choices. I like a lot of stuff - and so I push to go faster, to shrink the time between the takes so that the takes are what you're spending all your time on.

Our job as the game creators or developers - the programmers, artists, and whatnot - is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user's shoes. We try to see what they're seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.

Turns out, what I love doing is making games. Not hyping games or trying to sell a lot of copies. I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak.

Game design is a funny thing. There are people out there who are really good at it, but it's not clear that they can teach it. It's a very intuitive process. It's an art.

There are now college degrees in game design and interactive media, so if I were starting now, I would probably do that. When I started, you had to break into design from QA or programming or art, but it's really not true anymore.

I like entertainment and think mastery is good, though I don't feel like a master. If a theme means having a story that's legible, then that's certainly what we do. But we don't treat design as an add-on layer.

It can't be stressed enough that in order to produce great graphics, you have to have a good product and a good client capable of making decisions.

I've always been a proponent of the idea that technology doesn't matter to game design. The example I always like to point out is 'Tetris,' one of the greatest games ever made.

Design is nothing if not decision making.

I'm always thinking about whatever game I'm working on. My brain works subconsciously on design pretty much every hour I'm awake.

As a game creator, I'm not 100% satisfied when looking back at the previous game that I released.

We built the iPod in weeks. It had to be what I thought it was going to be because there wasn't time for endless refinements.

I'm a designer, and for me, things are always evolving, and such evolution is necessary.

Design is an unknown.

Just make games for yourself and try to have a critical eye to what you do. If you genuinely like the game, there will be other people who like it as well.

If the game designer produces more content than he can consume per month, some fraction of the people will say more quests, more tests, more challenges, more whatever, and they will be compelled by it.

Our developers will make great games for whatever high-end platforms exist.

First, I take a lot of time to just explain my vision of what the game should be to the team. Then I make all subsequent decisions based on how I want to feel when I buy the game, and what impressions I want to have of it. I then go about implementing the little points that will lead up to that finished product.

Don't define the game by the list of the features. Define it by the experience you want to have.

I enjoy the process of adding elaboration into games and like to communicate with users through the details I create.

You have to have this straddling balance of realizing that games are incredibly complex. You can have an idea of where you want to go with something, the structure of something, but the actual moment to moment figuring all this out-it unravels over the course of, in 'God of War''s case, about five years.