John Carmack on Designing Quake's Addictive Gameplay | Joe Rogan

It's really cool to see. And it's, these games, particularly Quake, they are unbelievably difficult to master. It's one of the more fascinating aspects of like video game play and addiction is the complexity. Like when you would watch, like remember, do you remember Thresh? Oh yeah. So quite Thresh was the one that won my Ferrari in the first Red Annihilation tournament. Oh, cool. Thresh was the hero back in the day of early Quake play. He was just this, what is it? Kenneth Fong, is that his name? Yeah, or Dennis Fong. Dennis Fong. Dennis Fong. There he is. There's Thresh. And I remember I would watch demos. One of the cool things about Quake was that you could, is that his Ferrari? You won the Ferrari, let me see that. Yeah, so that was my old Turbo 308. Now you Turbo charged your Ferraris too, which I want to get to as well, which is pretty crazy. This guy was like the first real killer in Dennis Fong. There you go. First real killer in the Quake playing games and you would be able to watch him play on demos. You would play through his eyes. So you would be able to see like how he does things and move around. It was really cool. Some of the interesting things about Quake where it wasn't really so clear when we were designing it, but it is a brutal game, especially in one on one where a lot of modern games are much more approachable, where if you followed a lot of the Quake games, a lot of them were just blowouts where you would get somebody that would take control of the level and they would be running their pattern, denying anyone any foot in the door. And you'd wind up with these 20 to one blowout games where there are things that you can do in game design to make it more approachable. Where like if you don't have health packs where you can keep because in a game like Quake you go in as long as you come out on top in the fight, you've got this little window to run around and bring yourself, bring your health back up. So even if you're only 5% better, you might win every engagement because you have enough time to go back, get yourself back up before you wind up reengaging. Where in another game, if you didn't have health that would continue as you had the ability to bring it back up, then even if somebody didn't win, if they knocked you down a whole lot, then they might get you the next time around and scores can be much more even. But Quake gameplay winds up brutal, tending towards blowouts and very frustrating for me. It did not have the approachability for new players where a lot of more modern games, things like Overwatch can be jumped into a lot more easily because team play is another aspect of that. Where if you've got a team, you could be on the winning team even if you suck because you might have really great players that are kind of covering for you there. You can jump in and have the chance to say, yay, I won. Even if you didn't contribute at all and you might wind up doing something, you start off being completely useless and then you slowly work your way up to being able to contribute effectively for your team. So I can recognize some of these things now about ways to make games more approachable, but the kind of brutality of Quake-like there was a – it was a taste that a lot of people really did like. It wasn't so much explicitly designed for that, but it worked out that way. And that's one of the interesting things as we look at game design today versus the old days. A lot of people fall into a sort of nostalgia trap about saying, well, the games I grew up with were the greatest games ever and you see it with music and movies and everything. And I tend to be much more optimistic about the state of things today where the amount of effort that goes into the modern games is extraordinary, just the detail and all the quality on all the different levels. But there is a little sense of games are so expensive to make now, sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars, that they do have to be conservative. So they have to be careful to make sure that they've got something that has a broad mass appeal. And I think that is the upside of some of the older games where they might have a little bit more of a distinct flavor. They weren't sort of focus group to death in the way that some of the more modern games can be. That's interesting. Yeah, focus group to death, I'm sure, is a problem. The Quake blowouts, although that is a thing, it's so fun when you're the person blowing the other person out that it's worth learning the maps. And that's the – well, some people don't understand what we're talking about. Quake would have – well, it has maps. And on those maps, like this is where the rocket launcher is, this is where the railgun is, this is where the health is, this is where the mega armor is. And you had to know where these things were and that they would regenerate every X amount of seconds. And so you're managing not just your fighting, but you're also managing the resources. So you're running around and trying to control the map and trying to control the mega health and trying to control where the armor is and don't let the guy get the railgun, don't let the guy get the rocket launcher. And in doing that, it's this incredible game of strategy as well as like fast twitch aiming and there's so many factors going on. And the Masters would have at times such that they're just running to where it's going to spawn and a half second before they get there. It respawns, they run over it, it's theirs and it's gone. And the difference between the top level players is something you see in competitive games a lot, even today, is you get the sense of the big fish in the small pond. You know, it's like I am the, I totally beat all my friends' asses or the best, I'm the best player anybody's ever seen in my tiny little area. And then you put them in the big pond with some of the professional players and they just, they get nothing. You know, they wind up not being able to land a shot. There is that much difference. Of course, you see that in everything, martial arts, where you get the dojo hero in one place that then goes in and actually rolls with the professional and just finds out that they weren't all they thought they were. And there's even more layers of that in games because you're not so confined to some of the physical limits of the human body. Yeah. And the amount of time you can do it is not confined to the physical limits of the human body. So there's people out there playing 10, 12 hours a day where they're thinking and sleeping and dreaming and, you know, catching people with rail shots in the middle of the air. Yeah. That sense when you're obsessive about something, how it does invade your dreams. And there have been a number of times in my career when I'm learning new things, when I'm just immersed in whether it's a new programming paradigm, a new piece of technology, and I'm working 13 something hours in a day and I go to sleep and I have dreams about what I'm working on. That's when I know I'm really deep in the groove of soaking in this new information. And the dreaming is my mind helping synthesize this into a useful form so I can apply this in the future. And those are some things that I look back on very, very fondly when I've been that obsessive about something that it's soaked into my dreams. Yeah. And I get that with martial arts when I was competing, I would throw kicks in the middle of the night. I would have dreams where I'd be moving and I'd wake up thinking that I was in the middle of a fight. And I had a real problem when we have this land room set up here with Quake on it. And when we got into it where my addiction got re-sparked again, we were playing two, three, four hours a day, I was starting to have Quake dreams. It was really weird. Like I'd have dreams that I was going down corners and dodging rockets. That game is so immersive and you get done with it. And your heart is pounding like me and Jamie and Jeff would play. And then when it was over, we would all be out of breath. Our heart would be racing. We'd have to get up and walk around.