John Carmack Quotes

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.

In video you are starting with nothing but a black screen. There's no game there. With pinball you at least start with that basic concept, but not with video. The challenge of going from no game to something today is only different because you have to create something so damn fun people will pay $1.00 every two minutes to play it.

I was the lead designer on 'Portal,' and I really enjoyed making that type of game.

I try not so much to create new characters and worlds but to create new game-play experiences.

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.

When I create a game, I try to focus more on the emotions that the player experiences during the game play.

I really wanted to make a dungeon crawler, but this game came out, 'Legend of Grimrock 2,' which was, like, the perfect dungeon crawler. It basically destroyed the genre for me, and no way could I make a game that good in that genre.

There's a misunderstanding that I've always tried to address straight on when this question comes up, which is that a 'Half-Life' story can somehow exist outside of a game. It can't. The story is created through the process of trying to figure out how to best use the features of the engine within the interesting set of constraints it poses.

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.

I'm not the expert on the great gameplay. I come in for the character design, monsters, atmosphere. I'm not the technician.

I have a couple of games I've wanted to make in the 'Tobuscus Adventures' universe.

What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself.

Inside the world of 'Devil May Cry,' we're not changing gameplay very much. We're making it more beautiful, more action-packed, and giving you a few more features, but the gameplay itself is the pretty much the same.

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

As successful as 'Borderlands' is and as much fun as everyone is having going after all the loot and finding and using all the weapons in the game, I often think that we really missed the mark by only doing 87 bazillion guns.

Game development combines all this disparate art stuff I'd been doing into one single thing that I could use to say very specific stuff.

You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I've decided to create stories through video games.

Making games look more photorealistic is not the only means of improving the game experience. I know, on this point, I risk being misunderstood, so remember, I am a man who once programmed a baseball game with no baseball players. If anyone appreciates graphics, it's me!

If it turns out that Mario doesn't really fit into the type of game I want, I wouldn't mind using Zelda as the basis of the new game.

All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience.

This is a whole new world to explore as a developer to go in and learn these new gameplay mechanics, to learn what it's like to actually control a character from a top-down, 'God's eye' view, and to figure out how the game camera can be controlled by the player's head.

The Sims is kind of an interesting case because we had all these expansion packs. We were able to incrementally add on and explore without invading the core dynamic or the core game play.

It takes sometimes years in the market to get the tuning to the right place where your game is as compelling at level 100 as it was at level 10.

One of the things we joke about in the FPS development is it's so hard to get the player to actually bother to look at all the cool stuff you've been doing. You spend a lot of time making really cool things, and usually the player isn't looking where you want them to.