John Carmack

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.

Because of the nature of Moore’s law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

I’d rather have a search engine or a compiler on a deserted island than a game.

At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can’t win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.

Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you. I’m happy to share what I can, because I’m in it for the love of programming.

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

The speed of light sucks.

Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.

The cost of adding a feature isn’t just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. The trick is to pick the features that don’t fight each other.

The Xbox 360 is the first console that I’ve ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we’ve had on PC.

It’s nice to have a game that sells a million copies.

Everybody’s saturated with the marketing hype of next-generation consoles. They are wonderful, but the truth is that they are as powerful as a high end PC is right now.