Q 1

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?

John 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.

Q 2

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?

John 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.

Q 3

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?

John 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.

Q 4

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?

John 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.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: What is the best video game of all time?

John 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.