John Carmack: 20Q

Q1

PLAYBOY: Back home in Kansas, you and two friends were arrested for stealing an Apple IIe computer. How does a smart 14-year-old get caught doing something so dumb?
CARMACK: We crawled in through a hole in the window, but one of the guys in our trio was too big. He opened the window to get inside and set off a silent alarm. The cops came while we were carrying computers across the yard. The funny thing is I couldn't have used them, because I couldn't have explained it to my parents if I had brought one home.

Q2

PLAYBOY: It was your first offense and a minor crime. You were interviewed by a shrink—and you blew it again. What did you say that landed you in a correctional facility rather than on probation?
CARMACK: The psychologist asked if I would ever do it again. I said if I hadn't been caught I probably would have. It was the honest answer. After I was sentenced he told me it wasn't smart to tell someone I was going to do it again. But that was not what I said. The home was not a good arrangement. I stuck out like a sore thumb. Everyone else was a five- or six-time offender, all for drug-related crimes. I can't think of one positive thing I learned there, but I had a lot more exposure to the drug culture than I otherwise would have.

Q3

PLAYBOY: Since its first release, in 1993, the Doom franchise has earned more than $200 million, about the same as a blockbuster movie. Is playing Doom 3 a better experience than watching a film?
CARMACK: It's really quite different. A computer game that tries to stack up to a movie experience isn't going to be a good game, because the two are fundamentally different. A movie is all about carefully crafted perfection. The director is in control of everything that happens with the characters, the lighting and the sound. In a game, the player is in control most of the time. It's not going to be as tight. Doom 3 is much longer than anything we'd done before. A lot of people will probably spend 40 hours going through it. Even if an editor or a director took those 40 hours and clipped out two of the coolest, watching them would probably be interesting only for the person who actually played the game.

Q4

PLAYBOY: Mesquite, Texas tried to ban video games and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court before it failed. Shortly thereafter you moved your company to that city. Were you trying to rub it in their face?
CARMACK: No, I didn't know about that when we decided to make the move. That must have been back when people associated video games with smoky pool halls and arcades. I admit that in years past we derived pleasure from rubbing our games in the face of the fundamentalist crowd. Satanic themes get a lot of people irate. We enjoyed offending the easily offended.

Q5

PLAYBOY: What is the best video game of all time?
CARMACK: The quintessential game that has influenced a lot of my game design is Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis. It's a really simple game: Go fast and be really cool. You don't need 20 little gadgets and gizmos.

Q6

PLAYBOY: Music, books and movies can live for generations, but video games quickly become obsolete. Does it sting to know that your creations may be forgotten next year?
CARMACK: I'm comfortable with it. I understand that I can read a 50-year-old book and know that somebody created something 50 years ago that is still relevant. For the most part, video games aren't like that, especially the 3D games that have tried to push the technology. They're going to look much cruder much sooner. We put ourselves in a particularly bad place. Important games live on in people's memories, but they're not something your kids will play later on.

Q7

PLAYBOY: You once won $20,000 in Las Vegas after teaching yourself to count cards. What's the secret?
CARMACK: Card counting is a lot easier than people think. It's a system to help keep track of the ratio of 10s to low cards. When low cards come out, it's good because it means more 10s and face cards are still in the deck, so you're more likely to blackjack and the dealer is more likely to bust. You're not memorizing which cards come out. You're memorizing only the ratio of cards. You still play the same basic blackjack strategy, but you change your betting. Of course, the casinos watch for that to see who's counting. The pros have strategies for slowly ramping up their bets. I didn't play like that, and they eventually kicked me out.

Q8

PLAYBOY: Your company, Id Software, is worth $500 million, yet you employ only about 20 people. You've resisted growing into a much bigger company, claiming that money is not a major motivator. So what is?
CARMACK: The nice thing about being successful and making enough money to be financially secure is that it removes almost all the levers that people use to manipulate other people. Everything is built around the idea that you can be manipulated into doing something for more money. Of course, lots of people never have enough money, and they are the ones who can always be led around by the nose. I wouldn't do something for more money unless it was already something I wanted to do.

Q9

PLAYBOY: You dropped out of the University of Missouri after one year. Does college have any benefit for an aspiring game programmer?
CARMACK: I tell people who are looking to get into the industry that the best thing they can do is demonstrate their ability. Do a game model in which you show what you can do. That means so much more to me than a diploma. A diploma is not even going to register. An MIT or a Caltech alum might get at least a raised eyebrow, but in general you're much better off being the team leader of the most popular game mod on the Net.

Q10

PLAYBOY: You own Armadillo Aerospace, a rocket-research company that is competing for the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million contest for the first team to launch a three-man crew out of the atmosphere and then do it again within two weeks. How close are you to liftoff??
CARMACK: We have two vehicles right now, a subscale model and a full-size model. We've done hover tests under a crane with the full-size model, and we just revamped the propulsion system. We're starting to fly the smaller one in untethered free flights. I had hoped we'd be further along than this, but we ran into a problem and spent the better part of last year developing a new propellant combination.