John Carmack on The Issues and Rewards of Bleeding Edge Engine Development

In this classic 2004 talk, legendary game engine programmer John Carmack engages in a candid and topical discussion about game development, technology, and the ideas that feed his appetite for innovation.
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[@johnappleseed8839]

He switches between contexts so effortlessly and he can do it for hours. The guy's a machine.

[@Betterog]

John Appleseed but is he tho? Like is he actually a... android?

[@johnappleseed8839]

+ Better Off He's just a human bean.

[@MachStarry]

@@Betterog A master coding artist, like everything he does is so seemless everything stringed togather simply and perfectly

[@TheCsabi86]

@@johnappleseed8839 I don't think that aliens are coding in Java EE.

[@BoomiestBomb]

I mean his subversion of technical limitations is kinda impressive and all, but I didn't think he was a genius until he said that pizza is the ultimate food. This man is a god. His reputation will live forever.

[@qeithwreid7745]

CLASSIC CARMACK at 22:46 where he hopes that smaller competitors can be more dynamic. It’s so in keeping with his no-patent, see-ideas-as-low-value, grounded, ethical genius. I. Love. It.

[@ar_xiv]

50:00 carmack calling out the PS3 cell processor before it even existed

[@urazoktay7940]

John Carmack is my hero, amazing video, thank you.

[@Lofote]

Man, give that man a question and he can talk for hours without a comma or a fullstop :-D

[@Sychonut]

Yeah, damn he can talk. With those nerdish glasses and voice of his, I would have expected him not to make a peep if I didn't know him.

[@SteelSkin667]

His Quakecon keynotes were glorious. He spoke for 3 hours without a single pause or looking at his notes.

[@ZoidbergForPresident]

Yeah, unfortunately I have a bit of a trouble following him... :/

[@Smokecall]

Lofote this talk reminds me of how spoiled we have been with those power point presentations GDC talks of today

[@enduringwave87]

With those lil Hmmms in between X-D

[@samuelschwager]

It really seems like he has it all figured out. No thinking breaks at all. A true legend!

[@SpecReviewPlus]

Little did John know, his next big game Rage would not ship quickly like he first thought. Games in general took a lot longer the more time passed. Especially today. Awesome talk. He's a God.

[@Al1987ac]

27:38 Carmack's forecasting Quake 2 RTX.

[@BudgiePanic]

real

[@fuzz11111111]

Exactly what I was thinking. We've also got a possibly bigger Quake 2 remaster coming soon (maybe).

[@flowolf86]

Fascinating that 13 years after that, almost everything he said became reality or is still in the process of becoming reality.

[@tehf00n]

not really. He wasn't the only one saying it.

[@flowolf86]

tehf00n But does that make the speech invalid? Everybody is saying all kinds of things. For you to know which ideas are must likely true, adapt that idea and extend it... That's the real deal

[@AlexeyIovchuk]

A question. Are there any predictions that didn't happen?

[@Manx123]

Games sure as shit don't look as good as Lord of the Rings, at least certainly not from a technical perspective.

[@Manx123]

Also, he was very delusional about dispensing with multi-core processors, as, regardless of how immense is the challenge of programming for them compared to single-core processors, it was an unavoidable shift. It would be like complaining about GPUs.

[@AntiProtonBoy]

The man is an inspiration for us all.

[@BirdManN9]

"... incredibly unbroken sentence moving from topic to topic, no one had a chance to interrupt, it was really quite hypnotic... "

[@thoughtcriminal3843]

lol nice TNG reference.

[@MinecraftTutorialVideo]

Interesting to look back at this and marvel at the work and future he helped create. A real genius, his turetts didn’t really stop him from teaching us so much. Im glad his wife convinced him to speak publicly at this event.

[@lewislewis3531]

Masters Of Doom introduced me to John Carmack. Aside from getting rid of his cat, the guy is the nearest thing I have to a personal hero

[@cultofape]

OMG, i can never unhear John Carmacks voice again...mmm

[@Domarius64]

He predicted the indie game dev scene development, and the difficulty of programming on the PS3.

[@redsmith9953]

The good feature of J Carmack talks is frame independent feature * deltaTime , so you can listen his talk on every speed and understand all the content anyway .

[@igorthelight]

Good one :-)

[@slimebuck]

This man is a god among men. .. but honestly he reminds me of the scientist dude from Simpsons…. he likes go go mMhh hhmmmmm a lot and move his eyes around exactly the same lol

[@MyLittleMagneton]

The title is to long to be viewed from the home screen. I only read: "The Issues and Rewards of Bleeding", and was like WHAT.

[@Malthan]

I clicked the video just to see what does that title mean :D

[@firagabird]

Scias you may not be aware, but all modern game development requires regular blood sacrifices to maintain graphical realism.

[@archivarius7178]

technically-legit clickbait

[@federicomedinauy]

John Carmack is all you need to read to click on the video ;)

[@SeanJTharpe]

Everytime he goes "mm!" I think of a computer loading :) Such a very smart man!!

[@mohammedgasmallah1038]

Listening to this, the first 10 minutes make you realize how smart of a guy he is. I would love to talk to him!

[@kitten-inside]

I studied with a few guys like that. It is very humbling to speak to people whose "obvious/trivial" is your "it took me a good few hours to understand".

[@hadriscus]

Dude's ability to predict the future is overpowered

[@klutch4198]

so OP

[@LungMing23]

This is incredible. He is a machine. I miss the combo of Romero and Carmack. Has he done any more recent interviews?

[@bulutcagdas1071]

Here's Romero: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eaTEY5ehgKufm5I

[@psychowordsmith]

Carmack did an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.

[@nickwilson3499]

Now with Lex Fridman

[@mygaffer]

Super nerdy and I love it. Very interesting talk.

[@jamesoglover]

Character AI in games: 14:57 "...in the end, we are making a product that's supposed to entertain people and the choices that you make in technical directions, if you want to be successful, you have to kind of keep your eyes on the value rather than necessarily in some ways what you consider the quality of what you're doing."

[@johnwatson2675]

I learned rigid body dynamics from Chris Hecker's article series from back in the day, but this is the first time I saw his face/heard his voice. What a fun piece of history this video is!

[@piyh3962]

15:20 - He's now working on artificial general intelligence. This guy is the Mike Tyson of software engineering.

[@MikeBertelsenDK]

And today he sounds, looks and talks the exact same way. He just leveled to over 100

[@Kensuke0987]

And right now, there are people who are trying to emulate old graphics with techniques like color quantizing (reducing 32bit colors to 8bit), and these tend to be more computationally expensive!

[@greenbean2222]

Why is it hard,

[@Kensuke0987]

​@@greenbean2222 probably not difficult to implement; the techniques are out there and the shaders are probably even already available. you probably don't even need any shader coding experience with what modern IDEs would let you do (e.g. Unity). getting it to look right is a matter of creativity (knowing which techniques to use) and familiarity with old graphics (color palettes, dithering, etc). but when you want to leverage all the modern tech, under the hood, the computer (GPU) has to take extra steps to achieve the same look of the 90's. i don't think i can explain it briefly in this comment, but you can check out how different ways of color quantizing may be implemented and why it might be a little more computationally expensive.

[@aloluk]

He is a genius.

[@Annatar0]

13:42 what he says about character interaction and AI here is still a major issue today. Look at most modern games with the extreme quality of work yet the character interaction and AI in general is still almost the same as it has been for..what..15 years now?.

[@jasonjasonjasonjasonjason]

I love all the extra sounds so fuckin hilarious

[@_Aemse]

"oh yeah im a rocket scientist I guess" *mic drop* this fucking guy lol

[@CharlesVanNoland]

I have heard the beginning of his foray somewhere before, multiple times. It sounds really familiar, but I can't remember when or where.

[@rafalkowalczyk5027]

hard work always works

[@willl4575]

True rockstar to me !

[@jajanken8917]

Hahaha, I just finished reading "Masters of Doom" by David Kushner, where he described John Carmack as a guy who always finishes his sentences with "Mmm.". And he really does that! That's so hilarious!

[@joeblo1111]

He's gotten rid of that speech impediment since then.

[@ronanderson1023]

720p, damn, carmack will be proud ;P And not the good 720p also

[@Lim_Quake]

worth 1 hour of my life

[@eduardgelbling8926]

Issues -> Bugs Rewards -> Bucks

[@Siledas]

24:10 John references both the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Moore's Law, because his 'predictions' on tech trends tended to *determine* tech trends due to the popularity of the games ID was making back in their heyday ...this may have been the only audience in the universe where getting a laugh from a joke like that would be possible.

[@hadriscus]

yeah I can't think of a different crowd where that would land nearly as well

[@SourBogBubble]

He's also the first to start modding Ferrari's.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

It's interesting to listen this talk 20 years later (that is, in 2024) and think about how accurate it was. The GTA V from year 2013 already had over $200 million budget and nobody yet knows how expensive GTA 6 will be to create.

[@cube2fox]

Especially that part where he talks about everyone developing on the "Ultra 64" being forced to draw with a broad brush, while having really fine brushes makes it possible to spend arbitrary amounts of money on artists. That's certainly the case for GTA 5: Since they are not limited much by the hardware anymore, they can outclass all the others simply because they can spend more money on game art.

[@shmookins]

This is good for archive reasons, but the topic is 13 years old. It's good GDC is uploading these old videos, but please don't forget to upload new videos as well.

[@Xiaopang3333]

"Aye..."

[@t3hPoundcake]

@24:00 that is one of the most hilarious things I've ever heard John Carmack say.

[@spookyfox3546]

Simulation of weather and nature, I'm waiting for this.

[@dixie_rekd9601]

its already a thing! :)

[@papasmurf205]

27:33 Quake II RTX

[@typedef_]

On where ?

[@ahriik]

Can someone with a bit more hardware technical understanding elaborate on what he says starting around 49:40? He talks about not liking how consoles are trending towards multiple processors, and specifically discusses a theoretical console with a CPU and discrete GPU being nice to program on, but not being ideal. Is the "ideal" situation he has in mind something like an SoC, kind of what we have now with Xbox Series S/X and PS5, or something even more unified, perhaps not unlike Apple's M1 chips? Like, I think you could definitely take what he's saying and apply it to something like the PS3 which went hard on multiple processors with the Cell architecture, and how that ended up being a pain to develop for early on (so much so that lots of multi-platform games ran worse on PS3 compared to PC/360; or to the point that some devs just refused to work on it like Valve). But the 360 had multiple cores, and also wasn't x86. Maybe I'm overthinking it or just attaching different meaning to what he is saying. Cuz from a dev standpoint, why would you not want a console to be more like a PC, with a discrete CPU and GPU and identical architecture? Is he just saying that consoles should focus on exploring more what can be done with unified processing because they don't necessarily have the baggage of years of software and OS compatibility to worry about, unlike PCs. Is there maybe some kind of bottleneck with separate CPU and GPU systems that may at some point manifest itself?

[@fullauto86]

Good questions

[@user-sl6gn1ss8p]

13 minutes in and the guy talked about user-view freedom and AI. Quite prescient : o

[@DOSRetroGamer]

I'd like to see a desk with a few thousand items on it 😌 Or did he mean food crumbs in the keyboard? 😁

[@soulserrated]

When the first guy came out.. I was like "John?"

[@rafalkowalczyk8151]

well everything I know about industry-grade graphics programming comes from: M.Abrash, J.Carmack and E.Haines :-)

[@hadriscus]

Crazy genius

[@maymayman0]

51:50 sounds like cliffy b kinda

[@edmbootcamp6188]

a hoigen god bles you sir

[@behnam2081]

10:00 PS5 3D Audio predicted 👏👏👏

[@Orinslayer]

So hyped for the Xbox 2. 😃 I wish it was called Xbox 2 and not Xbox 360.

[@DOSRetroGamer]

They couldn't have done that as there was already a PS 3 coming out. Calling the 360 Xbox2 would have made it look immediately outdated to the uneducated.

[@vinniciusrosa8284]

2020

[@LindsayKay]

Ha! Mine was a Z80 with 1K. The VIC20 was plush by comparison.

[@cube2fox]

Starts at 2:40.

[@eddie3716]

If all of that was off the cuff, holy crap that was impressive.

[@indycinema]

15:50. He did not predict his future in AI.

[@CharIie83]

find the hard problems, and solve them?

[@codybishop7526]

27:40 this is what they did with Quake 2 RTX

[@Lofote]

As genious as he is, he forgot that the VIC-20 did not just have lame 4 kB of RAM.. it actually had the amazing amount of 5 kB RAM :-D

[@DOSRetroGamer]

He is so smart, he could have probably solved fusion power, climate change and cancer all within his lifetime. Instead, he decided to invest his energy into video games. I can live with that.

[@Christopher-xn8qk]

0.05...Advisory board member Mr Pecker ...lol

[@mareksicinski3726]

5:01 are you sure huh 5:14 not exatly true also as we've ssen

[@bsacamano4043]

Basically letting you know the ps3 is going to have inferior third party games to the 360

[@pikkuadi]

The year Half Life 2 came out. Think about that.

[@nicolaslandau4692]

The year doom 3 came out too

[@wedusk]

And Far Cry

[@miguelpereira9859]

@@wedusk And WOW

[@ThisIsTheBestAnime]

I wonder when Half Life 3 will come out...

[@orbik_fin]

I took ashot eevry tiem John said "on there".

[@mrwiffler9942]

Carmack needs to get away from AI and get back into games. Prove me wrong.

[@Choco-sk2gj]

I agree dawgey, no more VR and Ai we need Games!

[@Alpha-kt4yl]

While I personally disagree with his opinion on games as art, he still is a genius that has still done a lot for games as a medium.

[@smallbluemachine]

Fair enough. It's whatever you want it to be. But id software, Nintendo.. Blizzard.. any of the successful companies we know today didn't become going-concerns by making art. -If you want to make a game to be consumed as art then you have to roll with the punches commercially, if you want it to sell.

[@ElloDarknessMyOldFriend]

hmm...hm...hmm

[@rurzan]

Surprisingly, unlike the usual "uhs" and "you knows", I don't find John's mannerism annoying, perhaps because it's more an innate thing (like stuttering) rather than language sloppiness. Edit: OK, I got to the "Iams". It's more distracting.

[@SteelSkin667]

If you look at more recent talks, you'll notice that his speech impediment has gone better over the years.

[@rurzan]

Yep, watching the 2015 talk right now, much better. Gotta respect that. Great guy.

[@voloman19]

the 'speech impediment' is COCAINE

[@rjmunt]

I'd never heard that impediment/tick before. Big respect to Mr Carmack for giving a talk like this and sharing his knowledge, knowing that there gonna be people trying to take the piss.

[@monkeyrobotsinc.9875]

he smarter than grandpa einstein

[@intheory32]

Funny cuz valve either just solved or was going to solve physiques, characters and acting in one go.

[@Syke1337]

"Video Games shouldn't be art" - John Carmack 58:33 The Man told us back in '04, and no one listened.

[@josiahmanson]

What he actually said is that AAA video games are not and should not strive to be art. This is akin to how blockbuster movies are not and should not strive to be art. He didn't say the medium itself was unable to have art created in it. This is an important distinction that people often don't understand.

[@miguelpereira9859]

Ironically games started to take themselves more seriously but ended having less substance. Think of Fallout 1 Vs Fallout 4

[@Coopersville]

​​​@@codebookspectrum7421 Anyone who creates art as a career, including all the biggest film directors, authors, musicians, historical painters/playwrights, and game designers will recommend a blue collar approach to creating art. Regardless of whatever chip on your shoulder you have against Meta, Carmack is just furthering the technology he envisioned when he read Neuronmancer in the most efficient way he can as a middle-aged man. Joining the 27 Club is considered way more cringe even by the arthouse crowd.

[@YOUCANTDOTHATONTELEVISION]

His lip smacking or tongue clicking is so brutal to listen to. Great talk though

[@DagonExcelstraun]

"Some things are almost done" Sorry John, we'll never have big enough monitors

[@NeilRoy]

Yeah, in 2004, we still had some higher resolutions to come. But now, I have been happy with 1080P for quite sometime now and I just don't see a need for higher. You can but... is there a NEED, does it add to anything, not really, at least not in my opinion.

[@gavinw77]

1080 isn't good enough at all, on a 27" screen for instance, I can see the pixels - that means I don't have smooth pixel animation, there is spacial and temporal aliasing issues, which are a huge deal for some types of games and graphics styles. And text isn't as clear as it can be at 1080p. 4k may not even be enough to deal with some of the graphical issues that come with resolution. Some say 8k on 24" inch screens is required.

[@JimGiant]

I think 8k will be enough or very close for large monitors. For these to be mainstream with full colour gamut, 144hz and ultra fast response times etc is probably another 5 years away at least though. You probably want higher again for VR. Still the end is definitely in sight. The only reason I can see to go beyond this would be for playing back footage in slow motion or zooming in.

[@Manx123]

" You can but... is there a NEED, does it add to anything, not really, at least not in my opinion." I bet a lot of people say the same thing about 60fps. That is, the ones who've never tried something faster.

[@thisscreensucks]

monitor doesnt equal resolution. are you really trying to correct carmack on computer science?

[@ojjoooooo]

I wish Elon Musk could speak like this. :p

[@Jeffdraws101]

This is the difference between someone who is actually smart (Carmack) and a capitalist who hires smart people and pretends they invented rockets and electricity cars.

[@tradito]

There's no way the nerds in The Simpsons weren't modeled after Carmack.

[@SnakeEngine]

John Carmack - the master of redundant information.

[@atillacodesstuff1223]

hm

[@ExtremelyTastyBread]

hnnnmph

[@DOSRetroGamer]

This man must believe that if he ever stops talking, the world will stop as well

[@nikosyn5238]

mmm

[@pdxbmwfan5824]

Mmm

[@gamgeenee2]

mmm tsk

[@o4hk]

mmhu

[@simonfarrugia26]

hmmm

[@Bowsar1337]

one of the main reasons that the game industry is complete garbage, it's really the same with all creative industries now, is because of their focus on technology, thinking that that is going to give some kind of improved result, truth is, technology in 2010 could already do 90% of everything it can do now, there's very little progress occurring, but what we are seeing, is a regression in game design, dumbing down, simple mechanics that are dressed up with flashy fireworks on the screen, graphics have become bloated and frankly, an eyesore, they no longer support the gameplay but get in the way, art quality has declined and is absolute bottom of the barrel now, there is no spark of imagination, you do not feel any love in the games, you don't feel like the people who made them have really any passion at all, either because they don't or because they are managed by layers of plutocratic bureaucracy where they really aren't designing anything at all, simply following orders from someone rich, with design decisions geared around milking as much money out of the player as possible, even using neuroscience and psychological manipulation, which is proven that the games industry is now implementing neuroscience to maximise profit extraction, to turn players into payers, "gamers" are little more than cattle to these people, and the games are sterile and soulless, there really is no actual gameplay to speak of, dumbed down trash designed by people who are incompetent at videos games or don't even play them for people who are incompetent at video games, and to give them a big fanfare at the end, congratulations champ, you beat the easy game, and bought it and the pre-order and some microtransactions, thank you, sucker, buy the next one

[@samghost13]

hmm yes hmm what did he say?

[@furynotes]

5:25 to 5:40 John Carmack "We're still a long ways. from what anyone would really term photorealistic. 3 Years later Crysis is photorealistic. Could barely run on anything,

[@Cinnamon1080]

Crisis looked good, but nowhere near photoreal.

[@Cavs191]

Some Thing and can’t run on “anything” especially for the first couple years when it came out. U needed a very expensive PC at the time to run that game.

[@miguelpereira9859]

Crysis was neither photoreal nor could "run on everything"

[@MichaelReznoR]

Actually, Crysis just looked well ahead of its time, and had lots of presets for different graphics hardware, making it possible to run it quite well on a very wide range of hardware. It required only a Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram and a GPU from 2003 (Radeon 9800 Pro). It was only the topmost highest preset Very High with enabled MSAA on top of it that gave it all those memes. One of the "disadvantages" of releasing a game that is too much ahead of its time (either in terms of graphics fidelity or expensive graphics settings for the hardware of the future). Quite similar to how the remaster is now (except the "well ahead of its time" part in this case in terms of actual graphics look compared to other titles).

[@papasmurf205]

Way off photorealistic

[@Fridgemusa]

Does John have tourettes, why does he keep humming?

[@DumbledoreMcCracken]

Forest Gump

[@Choco-sk2gj]

John Carmack is a living legend, if you hear him talk and think Forest Gump then YOU are Forest Gump

[@DumbledoreMcCracken]

@@Choco-sk2gj you provided no counter argument other he has "fans". So what?? I don't even remember why I made that connection, but obviously you had nothing productive to add. Cultist never do.

[@nightmarezer0507]

The "mmm" or buzzing noise + the lip smacking makes this almost unwatchable. I love all the things you have done for gaming, and I highly respect you John but damn. You must have a verbal tic or something I feel sort of bad now but I can't unhear it.

[@sev2300]

The cool kid of the 80s