What Was the Origin of Wolfenstein 3D and How Did It All Begin?

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"I was doing, I was hard scrabble contract programming work," he says. "It just unlocks something deep in me and understanding what these machines are all about" He met two programmers there John Romero and Lane Roth that for the first time ever knew more cool stuff than he did where the world was just different back then. And they kept asking him to come down and work for them here.

John Carmack is a legendary programmer, co-founder of id Software, and lead programmer of many revolutionary video games including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the Commander Keen series. He is also the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, and for many years the CTO of Oculus VR. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
John’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack
Books mentioned:
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: https://amzn.to/3SkNZER
Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D: https://amzn.to/3QlOqg8

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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(09:49) – Programming languages
(40:53) – Modern programming
(50:55) – Day in the life
(58:45) – Hard work
(1:01:58) – Pizza and Diet Coke
(1:04:43) – Setup
(1:30:01) – id Software
(2:02:50) – Commander Keen
(2:09:36) – Hacker ethic
(2:17:16) – Wolfenstein 3D
(2:37:14) – Doom
(2:51:34) – Quake
(3:15:55) – John Romero
(3:23:42) – Metaverse
(3:52:04) – Elon Musk
(3:57:59) – Mars
(4:07:01) – Nuclear energy
(4:10:39) – AGI
(4:57:51) – Andrej Karpathy
(5:00:50) – Martial arts
(5:09:49) – Advice for young people
(5:18:49) – Meaning of life