I really do think VR is now one of the most exciting things that can be done in this whole sector of consumer electronic entertainment stuff.
With ZeniMax, they have a lot to be proud of. 'Fallout 3' is one of the favorite games of so many of our people. But they had zero overlap with the things we do. We do the best shooters in the world. It's a perfect hand and glove fit. We started talking about this before they rolled out 'Fallout 3'. We watch them roll it out worldwide.
I think that first-person shooter is a stable genre that's going to be here forever, just like there are going to be driving games forever. There's something just intrinsically rewarding about turning around a corner and shooting at something.
Obviously, virtual reality is where I've placed my bet about the future and where the excitement is going. At this point, I could say it's almost a lock. It's going to be magical - it is magical - and great things are coming from that. Along the way, I was focused on the first-person shooters. I said we should go do something on mobile.
I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming - the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and Internet play, game mods, and so on.
The stereoscopic panoramic videos that we're showing on Samsung VR are getting a lot of positive traction. It's exciting when you see creative types - whether from the music, film, or video industries - look at this stuff. The gears are turning in their head almost immediately about how they can use it as a new medium.
I consider myself a remarkably unsentimental person. I don't look back on the good old days.
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 think 'World of Warcraft' shows that people today still like a good fantasy hack and slash game. I always thought that a lot of computer fantasy games leapt into complex party-based play somewhat prematurely.
When it became clear that I wasn't going to have the opportunity to do any work on VR while at id software, I decided to not renew my contract.
After the acquisition of id by Zenimax, we had sort of taken the mobile platform team down to a skeleton crew. We were left with about two people who were finishing up the previous obligations on that. The rest had just been dispersed and absorbed by the other teams in the company.
When people heard id Software's being acquired, everybody just assumed it would be Activision or EA. Why would we even consider going with a publisher that wasn't of that same size?
I did take some value out of looking at the extreme simplicity of implementation that the tight resource limits required. I do feel that modern games are often abstracted a lot more than is really necessary, and it leads to robustness issues.
If it weren't for Moore's law changing the playing field continuously, I would have been long gone. The rapid pace of hardware evolution still keeps things fresh for me.
Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.
We were doing mobile games before the iPhone. We were doing free-to-play with 'Quake Live.' We wanted to do massively multiplayer stuff in the early days but didn't have the resources to do it.
It is true that the gameplay for 'Orcs&Elves' was designed around the limitations of mobile phones, and that if we were starting completely from scratch for the DS, we would probably do things a bit differently, but the bottom line is that when we sit a random DS player down with the game, they have a lot of fun.
To the game code, the world is still just a tile map, but for rendering, each map was exported as a general-purpose 3D model, and the artists could then go through it and spend the polygons any way they liked, without the limits of line-of-constant-z software rasterization that we lived with on the mobile phones.
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.
I've never been one of those programmers that works effectively on short amounts of sleep. I've always needed eight hours.