John Carmack sits down with The Joe Rogan Experience

I finished listening to it and I wasn't even bored. If I were in Joe Rogan's position I could have made this interview last all day. I love that Carmack and I share the same interests with the same kind of enthusiasm. Probably true about a lot of us here.
 
Armenius said:
I finished listening to it and I wasn't even bored. If I were in Joe Rogan's position I could have made this interview last all day. I love that Carmack and I share the same interests with the same kind of enthusiasm. Probably true about a lot of us here.
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Sadly I Can't say the same any longer. I have zero interest in VR and competitive multiplayer gaming, and esports in general.
 
polonyc2 said:
he says Rage would have been a much bigger hit if it had been released 2 years earlier..."Be less ambitious with some of the technologies and get it out earlier"
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And yet it still needed a couple more years to bake with the rippin' and the tearin'.
 
A true legend IMO. If you read Masters of Doom you'd realize he's the only one from that team carrying on with those earlier visions: a fully realized VR world everyone can easily connect into. iD/Bethesda was only willing to go so far, so fast, into that stuff. Oculus/Palmer really saved him from getting too bogged down in the game development/cash-grab cycle. At the same time, he's stayed humble, not too stuck in the past, treats everyone (seemingly) with respect, insanely gracious with sharing his discoveries which helped fuel an amazing community of excited game devs-to-be, and still seems to enjoy what he's doing. Really hard to say the same for most in the industry, at least not those who ever reached "rockstar" status. Nowadays it's just rare, because teams are so big that no one person can really stand out, but things like Rift/Quest/Go wouldn't have been as successful if it weren't for John, even if he was just plunking away at some lower level video buffer management techniques or whatever... the competition for Valve/HTC and others in VR is probably also heightened with him more focused on it.
 
Youn said:
A true legend IMO. If you read Masters of Doom you'd realize he's the only one from that team carrying on with those earlier visions: a fully realized VR world everyone can easily connect into. iD/Bethesda was only willing to go so far, so fast, into that stuff. Oculus/Palmer really saved him from getting too bogged down in the game development/cash-grab cycle. At the same time, he's stayed humble, not too stuck in the past, treats everyone (seemingly) with respect, insanely gracious with sharing his discoveries which helped fuel an amazing community of excited game devs-to-be, and still seems to enjoy what he's doing. Really hard to say the same for most in the industry, at least not those who ever reached "rockstar" status. Nowadays it's just rare, because teams are so big that no one person can really stand out, but things like Rift/Quest/Go wouldn't have been as successful if it weren't for John, even if he was just plunking away at some lower level video buffer management techniques or whatever... the competition for Valve/HTC and others in VR is probably also heightened with him more focused on it.
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Not entirely sure I agree. One of the books I'm currently reading deals with the history of the internet. It talks about how almost every significant invention has been a collaborative effort, with most people going unrecognized. That, for a product to succeed, it needs 3 things. A group who can envision the product. A group which can engineer the product. And a group which can sell the product. The last one not only means selling to customers, but most products require more money than people have, so you need to also sell the investors. And that often ends up with bureaucracy destroying many promising inventions that had the talent to make the future a reality (i.e. Xerox Parc).

Carmack is a great engineer. But he's lacking in the ability to make games fun. That's where Romero and the rest of the id team helped out.

And another part of the podcast that struck at home, was how gamers would turn down graphics for the competitive edge. I remember my college roommate, back in the late 90s. $6000+ machine, with the latest and greatest of everything (he even had an LCD screen!). And he'd play Quake 2 with all the textures turned off.
 
I didn't know this kid was a UFC fighter image is from a UFC videogame.

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DrezKill said:
Haven't seen this yet, but John Carmack is the kind of person where I would watch his 3-hour or 4-hour QuakeCon keynotes in one sitting, and it felt like 20 minutes every time.
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There are a couple guys in the tech arena I always would stop everything to listen to what they had to say. One is John Cormack the other is Linus Torvalds. It's funny but they seem to have much in common. I remember watching a video of John at a developers conference probably 10 years ago talking about the current state of graphic APIs and how this bottleneck was going to squash innovation in game design in the near future unless new, modern APIs were developed. Like a prophet of old he told the future. Nailed it. Joe Rogan isn't really a tech guy but I would have loved to hear Johns comments on the progression of Vulkan and thing like RT Raytracing from Nvidia.
 
SomeoneElse said:
He not actually a fighter in the UFC, He's just a commentator. He is a black belt in Ju Jit su but doesn't get in the octogon.
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Maybe he was referring to CM Punk? I can't imagine how old Comixbooks would have to be to refer to 52-year-old Joe Rogan as a kid.

But yes, I believe Rogan was an easter egg in that game and they did the motion capture in secret.
 
One of my favorite Rogan interviews. Carmack's a telltale "dont judge a book by its cover" sort of guy. Didn't expect him to also be into martial arts... is he like the master of all trades, but a Jack of none? :D
 
Carmack definitely came off as a very intelligent man to me as well as a bit quirky. A lot of extremely intelligent individuals tend to have a quirk or two. Over all i thought he was a pretty cool dude. It never even crossed my mind that he was into rocketry, I think that was the coolest thing I found out about him.
 
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SPARTAN VI said:
Didn't expect him to also be into martial arts...
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I posted this before, but this is Carmack in attack mode, taking down Vin Diesel maybe (not sure, could be a video card manufacturer):

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I'm sure dude standing in background is next... his posture is just asking for trouble
 
The story about the cars was entertaining, turbocharging Ferraris' lol. That and the rocket stuff was pretty good. The last half.
 
Back in 2015 Joe had c9nothing from Cloud9 on the podcast and learned all about streaming. It's been a few years but it might be the episode where he really spoke at length about his crazy Quake days, buying cases of energy drinks, etc.

 
polonyc2 said:
he says Rage would have been a much bigger hit if it had been released 2 years earlier..."Be less ambitious with some of the technologies and get it out earlier"
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Well, he's not wrong. At the time, a lot of people were more familiar with Borderlands even though it was announced at least* an year later. Though I had seen this animal behaviour in other jungles before, it was quite a shit storm. I remember reading someone complaining and mocking id for copying BioShock with the crossbow electro bolts and how water reacts to electricity. My god, some people really don't know their gaming history.

* Can't be bothered to check, so don't quote me on that.
 
Domingo said:
I still feel like John needs strong writers and designers around him. He's a visionary with engines and large concepts, but not the details that make a game great.
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The guy was very hands on with Quake 3. By far the best 1v1shooter
 
Domingo said:
I still feel like John needs strong writers and designers around him. He's a visionary with engines and large concepts, but not the details that make a game great.
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ID always made tremendously interesting tech demos that other companies then usually used to create more well-rounded games. .....not saying ID made garbage, no far from it, but you could tell game-design at ID was more about the technology and less about game design, narrative (lolz)...they were making esports titles 20 years before any of us could say "eSports" with a straight face. Straight-ish face....an understanding-but-SMH face anyhow..........
 
Man, he sounds like a giant nerd. Never would have thought, lol. Good interview though.
 
Odigo said:
Man, he sounds like a giant nerd. Never would have thought, lol. Good interview though.
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Owns/drives/mods supercars, builds rockets, trains judo/BJJ/wrestling, codes iconic videogames and pretty much anything else you can think of, currently building VR hardware and experiences... And you got "giant nerd" out of all that?
 
Yeah, pretty much what he sounds like. By voice, can't speak for his personal life obviously. I'm not referring to his accomplishments.

Aix. said:
Owns/drives/mods supercars, builds rockets, trains judo/BJJ/wrestling, codes iconic videogames and pretty much anything else you can think of, currently building VR hardware and experiences... And you got "giant nerd" out of all that?
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That. was. awesome. Took a while to get through it, but fascinating interview. Joe Rogan could school the likes of MSNBCCNNFOXABCNBCCBSPBS on the art of giving a professional interview: ask the guest a thoughtful question and then let the guest answer without being rushed or interrupted. Carmack has had an interesting life to say the least and I'm old enough to remember how Wolf3D and DOOM* changed the gaming world.

*True off topic story: received the paid for version of DOOM on diskette through mail order the very last day of class before the Christmas break in 1993. Here I am in the EE building with the most awesome network multiplayer game to come down the pike with several computers and when I get it installed and working I am the *only* one left in the building as everyone else took off for home. Had to wait two weeks for other students to come back for someone to play with! At that time, it was pretty expensive to have one PC capable of DOOM let alone several in a network.

-Mike
 
I adore the guy. He's smart, and very generous with his time and knowledge. I love interviews with him, because you WILL get some new nuggets of info and the wisdom of someone who is iconic in the industry.
 
I watched waaaay more of that than i thought i was going to. Carmack is just such an interesting person to listen to.
 
I like Joe generally............but I can't stand his interview with Carmack. He has nothing intelligent to ask that doesn't immediately go back to how awesome Quake was, and how incredible it was, and man Quake. Dude Quake is ancient history, its 200 years old, that's your go-to statement? Carmack was sitting there humoring him but Jesus it's painful waiting for Joe to throw some kind of followup to something compelling that Carmack says, and all he can come up with are like 8th grade "You know whut would be KEWEL!???!?! BOXING GLOVES!". omg stfu man, please just stfu :) I'm no Mensa candidate but holy smokes......

Having thrown the guy under the bus, I will say this: When he asked about Cell Phone Addiction I was wondering how JC, being an employee of Facebook, answered that one......he fell back on his "Well it's not a problem for me" side-step type answer, and naturally there's not much followup. That could have gone somewhere.....
 
yea if you've heard carmack speak at length before there was almost nothing new here, joe shoulda known he isn't the sentimental type so bringing up quake/doom wasn't gonna lead anywhere interesting and carmack tends to go into autopilot with no end in sight if you aren't careful... his twitter page has more clues on what he's actually thinking and some personal stuff like his kid programming games now and books/movies he's into
 
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