A Gamer's Guide to Super Mario Bros.

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In most of the games at the time, if you think about sort of your classic Super Mario Brothers game, only about 10% of the tiles were actually different there. So this was a way to go ahead and say, well, I'm going to move it back and then I'm only going to change those 10 20 whatever percent tiles there. And that meant that it was essentially five times faster than if you were redrawing all of the tiles. That worked well enough for us to do a bunch of these games for high for gamers edge we had a lot of these scrolling games like slurknacks and shadow nights that we were cranking out at this high rate on PC

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:
– InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off
– Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit
– Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium
– Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings
– Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil

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

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman
YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips

SUPPORT & CONNECT:
– Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast
– Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman
– Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
– Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
– LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
– Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman
– Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman

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