It is true that the gameplay for 'Orcs&Elves' was designed around the limitations of mobile phones, and that if we were starting completely from scratch for the DS, we would probably do things a bit differently, but the bottom line is that when we sit a random DS player down with the game, they have a lot of fun. - John Carmack
It wasn't too many years ago when we were lucky to have three triangles for a nose on our characters. Now we've got pores and moles. - John Carmack
Oculus version three or five or whatever it ends up being is something that can be used unplugged - we'd have our own Android stuff and all that - but you could plug it into the PC and use that. - John Carmack
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. - John Carmack
Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function. - John Carmack
Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important. - John Carmack
There is absolutely zero doubt that you can technically do an excellent full-featured FPS game, because these devices are more powerful now than, like, a previous generation Xbox. - John Carmack
To the game code, the world is still just a tile map, but for rendering, each map was exported as a general-purpose 3D model, and the artists could then go through it and spend the polygons any way they liked, without the limits of line-of-constant-z software rasterization that we lived with on the mobile phones. - John Carmack
When people heard id Software's being acquired, everybody just assumed it would be Activision or EA. Why would we even consider going with a publisher that wasn't of that same size? - John Carmack
I think a lot of big game studios take the safe and uncontroversial route when it comes to social and political issues, for fear of losing sales. This leads to bland, focus tested experiences that maintain the status quo. - Eric Barone
Just realize that it's normal to start hating your own work. In many ways, it's a good sign because it shows that you are improving. Even if you start hating what you are doing, finishing a project is a very good feeling and can keep you much more motivated in the long run. - Eric Barone
Looking back, I think the development was characterized by phases of insane productivity followed by phases where I hardly worked at all. - Eric Barone
There are lots of random blog posters on places like Gamespot or NeoGAF or whatever who show a clearer understanding of Braid than people who are all, "I'm all about games, and narrative and meaning, and I write a blog just to tell you about how I analyze all these things." Those people have the same hit rate as your general forum poster. So that's given me a cynical response to that whole community, which is just that, "Guys, are you sure you're qualified to do this?" And that sounds asshole-ish, and mean and snarky, but that's just how I'm feeling right now. - Jonathan Blow
[..] there's some line that divides games that are beneficial from games that are harmful. It's not really my business to draw that line today, I don't wanna try and convince you exactly what's beneficial and what's harmful, because again, that is up to the opinion of every designer and in fact the opinion of every player. But what I would like is for people to have an opinion about it. When people design a game to think about what that game is doing, and when people play a game to think about what that game is doing. And people don't, right now. They think about how it has cool graphics and a lot of levels and, like, they love the story about killing the bad guy. Which is not a very self-aware place to be standing when you're consuming something that affects your life for so many hours and therefore affects your mind for so many hours. And that bothers me. That makes me feel bad about being a game designer. - Jonathan Blow
I'm not saying that all game designers are like that. I've encountered what I perceive to be that attitude. Whereas other game designers, who make games where you just run around killing a hundred dudes or whatever, I've had totally reasonable discussions with them and they're just like "no, I've really thought about it and here's what I think". And so, it's complicated. - Jonathan Blow
In movies you have all these different genres of movie and when you go to a different genre of movie, you have different emotional expectations. They are this sort of commercial experience in that you feel like, 'I paid to go see a comedy, so this better be funny', but that is not an expectation you would have going to see a drama or going to see a documentary or whatever, right. In games we don't seem to have that. Everybody expects this fun thing out of all games. - Jonathan Blow
It's a common thing among game designers, especially these days, to get into discussions about fun. And they're difficult discussions to have because fun is a very amorphous word - what it means to you may not even be the same thing that means to me. - Jonathan Blow
There's all these imaginary farms out there where you gain imaginary money but then there's a real farm with real money that pulls money from you over the internet and you don't ever see it because it's all behind your head while you're typing on the computer. - Jonathan Blow
You might play a game that has a good story. But compare the quality of that story to a novel, and the novel just beats the shit out of the game in every dimension. - Jonathan Blow
Bikes and planes aren't about going fast or having fun; they're toys, but serious ones. - Harrison Ford
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