Lex asks about the beginning of id software. John, after 10 brillant minutes, is talking about Pascal compilers and C. Someone must invent the Futurama _head jars_ because we must keep Carmack's head for eternity. He's so great that only Civvie's John Carmack titles compilation can describe his greatness.

Lex needs to have John Romero on the podcast

Have a friend that worked at SoftDisk when this went down. He’s not a gamer but remembers those ‘weird guys in the other office that always were drinking soda’.

John Carmack is a very interesting guy, his stories are very nostalgic for me personally.

made me smile that lex was shocked by "write games in assembly". I grew up in the 80's and knew hackers who wrote big programs entirely in assembly. There used to be animation competition that had to fit on a floppy disk. It was all written in assembly with particle animation and music.

Man, I loved these shareware times! When you finished the first episodes of games like Wolfenstein or Duke Nukem, they showed still pictures of the other episodes with new monsters, environments or weapons. That really sparked the imagination and encouraged to somehow get the other episodes. Best times🤘

14:28 I smiled a little when Carmack mentioned wizardry there.

This is wonderful. Thanks so much for making this happen, Lex, and thank you John for indulging our endless curiosity about the early days and your team's contributions to gaming. John is one year younger than me and I am also a career programmer who was drawn to those primitive machines whenever I could get my hands on one, starting in the 6th grade. Such an incredible time, watching it all happen, including the incredible improvements just in that short amount of time.

Would love to see a tv show about the life of John Carmack.

"If you want something done, ask a busy man."

Lex: Wait! you wrote games in assembly?! John: Yes. Lex: .... [When your GetNextFacialExpression(); returns NULL]

This is the closest you can get to time travelling and being there just listening, I wish they did a tv show/netflix series about it, something like Silicon Valley or Halt and Catch Fire but based on true events.

Doom 1 "shareware" was amazing. My dad would take me to the local computer store when I was a young kid, and I'd pick up a computer paper (with computer ads, review, and BBS numbers in it), but also I'd browse the $5 shareware floppy section of the store. The artwork for games never matched reality, but that didn't matter -- it was exciting; every game was fresh and new. Doom 1 SW was playing out on display one day, probably on some IBM Aptiva, and it just BLEW ME AWAY. Doom required I upgrade my 386SX though, which my dad did for me (VGA/ADLIB), and my addiction began. I was first in line to drop $60 to buy Doom 2 when it was released a short while later. I bought it with my savings too -- most games I got were "lent" to me by my friends, or were shareware titles my dad got me. My dad did get me a few boxed titles, like Lemmings or Myst, but they were pretty PG-rated.

An architect behind Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, Typescript is Anders Hejlsberg. This guy shifted the industry multiple times.

I have soooo much respect for OG game makers and programmers in general, I would have not even imagined to write assembly all day every day for work… I’ve dabbled with it using the Pi and man it’s hard

I'm 10 years younger than John, but when I was around 10 in the early 90s i did my games in qbasic and wrote all the routines for gfx in assembly. So basic was only used for game logic

I love that Carmack actually credited Tom Hall

This is so fun hearing John talk about Pascal and assembly, casually blowing Lex's mind. I remember playing around with the early 386 machines and those were the two tools I spent the most time with.

I wrote a bunch of games as a teenager in Turbo Pascal. Loved its inline assembly feature.

Not to brag but I wrote a game in assembly for the TRS 80 computer, back when I was just a teenager, it worked, though it crashed with some kind of memory error and didn't have sound, but still today I am amazed I was able to do that and at that age. It was similar to Sabotage for the Apple computers back in the late 80's

It is a fact that id software had far superior feel to their games than any other games at the time. Unreal, later on had a nearly as good feel, but I remember, even things that used the doom engine were not responsive in the same way. Id always had great feel. It was a long time before other games began to feel universally decent.

6:45 "contributed to building up the skill set" .. He mentions how much they learned cranking out a game in one month, and I was thinking of how good the Beatles got playing every night, for hours, in Hamburg, so I'll have to agree when he mentions the Beatles too. Love that Lex brings in the Dostoyevsky reference, when he had to write "The Gambler" in a month. Probably another good example is Philip K. Dick (of Blade Runner fame) who wrote numerous short stories.

Fun fact: Niklaus Wirth wrote Pascal for the same reason that Donald Knuth wrote MIX assembler. He was writing the book "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" and needed a language for it. At the time Algol was too big for computers at the university so he invented Pascal.

LOL, and then Id Software became infamous for, "It's done when it's done."

HAHA , The look on your face when John said he wrote these games in assembly LOLLLL

Carmack seems like a very orderly/focused person.

next best guest: Gabe Newell (Valve founder)... there wouldn't exist a Valve without id Software

A monthly subscription for games you say?

Could listen to John for hours...reminds me of a classmate of mine...brilliant

They're actually really lucky they weren't working for a greedier, more ruthless employer at the time.

Thank you so much for this! Carmack is the Carl Sagan of the tech and Information age. What an inspiration!

The full episode link is wrong.

Wow I am so loving this interview with John. He is bringing back so many memories. Dr Dobbs Journal. After maxing out the basic programming capabilities of the Atari 2600 my parents bought me the Commodore VIC 20. I learned machine language on that machine and then I moved on to the Commodore 64 where I learned how to write games in machine language. It was very challenging. Finally I moved to a PC programming in Turbo Pascal.

omg john carmack aged so well

Such a great story. My favorite book of all time is "Masters of Doom". I've literally listened to it over 20 times. Lex, I too was a kid that grew up on just the shareware version of games. I would take my weekly allowance down to Radio Shack every weekend for a new game. Those were the best times.

Really like listening to Carmack. Great storyteller :)

It’s crazy that this guy has no degree. And he’s the best programmer of all time , more or less. Insane

Best so far. I loved the apple IIe in UK. Then we had the BBC B. I had turbo pascal and programmed when I was 15 and it was only 20 pounds when all else was 200 and my parents bought it for me. Later I moved to Delphi.

I just want to see every person possible with a platform just do everything in their power to get some interview time with this man. We need to get this guy's brain mapped and catalogued. Just everything about his abstract methods of thinking through problems that makes some pretty ingenious solutions needs to be studied by coders everywhere so we can keep progressing tech forward. Carmack won't be around forever, we can't keep counting on him to reinvent the wheel lol. Hell his work in the VR space has been incredible so far too!

I love John Carmack so much. He is my hero. He is one of the main reasons i'm into computers and video games.

You can see who worked harder in thumbnail, romero acting like bass guitarist

Great story

uses crt; is how my journey really started... Writing TSRs to hack games while playing them was my hobby. The TSR would search the memory for specific values relating to in game money for instance and then take keyboard input to replace this value with a higher number. Those were great days.

I used to get CDs in magazines with random programs and games. You just installed them to see what they did. Before you had the bandwith to download from the internet directly.

When I was in hs I’d often see one of - at least what were rumored to be -carmack’s ferraris parked outside Id hq when I went to Town East mall in mesquite.

Feels a bit surreal that my first language was Pascal using the Turbo Pascal IDE, and on the first day I used it I played Dangerous Dave, which was randomly installed on the computer club computer I was using. This was in 2003.

Lots of games of that era were written in assembly, e.g RollerCoaster Tycoon.

"Everyone wrote games in assembly at that time" literally probably a couple hundred people max out of the 4 billion people on the planet at that time.

You guys talk about Turbo Pascal as well as JavaScript in another clip... you should totally interview Anders Hejlsberg... author of Turbo Pascal, C# and TypeScript.

First time i did that shareware was with doom. Had wolfenstein 3d from friends. And when doom came along put down that money. Remembering trying to make .wad levels eventually too!

Amazing video, i really enjoyed it, John Carmack is my idol, thank you.

I'm a software engineer now because I put all my effort into being able to edit faster with vim.

Carmack is always smiling

Those old, sweet memories from the past brought back by the one himself...

Regardless of the lack of financial success long term of shareware programs or games I know that is how me and everyone and their dog played Doom, Heretic, Hexen or really any games of that era. 💯 Think WinRAR. 😂

I don't think I have EVER heard Carmack mispeak... but he just said "innovation is the mother of necessity", but the quote is the other way around. "Necessity is the mother of invention".

What I would ask him was how he got the faith that hard work would pay off for him.

18:17 later there was free pascal, which lets you run on Dos Protected Mode 😍😍😍

Around here only rich kids had their own computer or even regular access to a computer in the 80s.

I wish id software would take over the Halo games now that they're under Microsoft too

Of course - it all traces back to The Beatles. Essentially, The Beatles invented video games, they just didn't have the technology at the time to fully realize the concept. disclaimer: I'm a Beatles fan.

14:00 😂

Loved hearing about the shareware model I played so many games this way they used to give them away free with magazines. I remember playing one game called search and destroy over and over.

LEGEND!

"You wrote games in assembly"... pacman, space invaders, etc... all machine code. Tbf I'd rather write assembler on a spectrum than write in anything in a modern gui.

Programs in the 1980s pretty much had to be written in assembly, or they'd run like garbage.

Playing Doom Eternal while listening to this. Thanks John ❤

Carmack....i LOVE him.for defending pascal!!! Great knowledgeable guy

Romero

40y.o. me just watched this with my mouth open

It's an ethical minefield, but I suspect many of the live questions can be answered at least in part by the instantiation of hardware in a wetware substrate or vice versa. A large learning model cannot learn that which it's not equipped to... If a thinking 'machine' is integrated with or housed in a substrate whose input is impacted by sensory systems capable of 'experiencing' pleasure and pain, it seems we have a game changer. Another thing that strikes me in these conversations is that qualia is desirable in the evolution of non-biological intelligent systems. For biological entities there are advantages (dealing with survival pressures, for instance) of being wrong through over cautionary behaviour (is it the wind or a predator rattling the bushes? Who cares? Run, just in case...). Is it an advantage for a system that can utilize sensory perception we don't have (discerning there is no danger in that bush etc.) to invoke a kind of Pascal's Wager on environmental situations? We don't know what consciousness is but we know that our form of self awareness is dependent on being deceived just enough to err on the side of caution . A.I. may not require the crude mechanisms and spandrels of natural selection as the selection parameters are provided for by an intelligent programing source. Knowing what some of our many levels of caprice are as coders for them, we might be well served by not imbuing A.I. with our evolutionary flaws and biases.

smart man indeed

Did he misspeak at 7:36 or am I just not smart enough to understand that colloquialism

Just let him tell the FSR story

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh so good !!

♥ Commander Keen ♥

can you imagine carmack telling you a bedtime story.... "once upon a time, there was pascal c++...."

legend

Robot from the future

Lex is not getting. John Carmack is not great because he wrote games in assembly language. A lot of other things made him great. Assembly language was the way that any professional software on the microcomputers were written. C was becoming more common, but that didn't happen until the mid 80s. If you guy much earlier than that, it's a lot less common. I was just a kid in High School, and I wanted to write games, so you ask around how it's done, and they tell you a few things, and you read some magazine articles, and look things up in a book, and learn a few tricks, and all the instructions you're being given on how to do things are in assembly language. And you have an assembly, and you start doing it. Also, the instruction set of the 6502 wasn't that complicated. It's weird, but it's not complicated. It's not like it is right now with pipelining, etc., where it's nearly impossible to have a human being write in assembly language that can possibly be better than what a C compiler can produce. It's just not very intuitive to break down instructions in seemingly unusual order that makes the code look less readable, but it's better for the CPU because it can pipeline things.

I'm sorry, but how does Lex, at 40 years old, need DOS explained to him... and not know what "game feel" is... and come off like he's 20 years old and new to computers?

These stupid interruptions and nonsense questions deviating John to a totally boring and different path when he is exactly coming to something interesting, that is so annoying. When he is about to say something that was not said by Romero in any interview or book, we find him answering bullshit like Pascal and Turbo Pascal.

As a computer scientist I'm surprised Lex didn't already know this history. I'm around the same age and I was fortunate to have CS professors who grew up on punch cards and recounted the history of the field (mostly in the context of evolving design of programming languages over time). Lex must have had an aversion to hearing anything about games, you'd have to go out of your way to avoid this info while being immersed in CS.

It's such a dicotomy having John Carmack, a really bright, enrgized person interviewed by a sloth like Lex, it's just painful, "is Dos like a pre-cursor to today's OS?" what!?

Technology ruined the planet.

lex is a clown

This is very niche, who understands 10% of what he is talking about?

The most boring podcast of all time