Doom to Not Have Lives

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We were taking our cues from the console and arcade games you know we wanted things that were sort of quarter eaters that were doing fast paced things. And there weren't save games in in most of this stuff. It was it sounds almost crazy to say this but it was an innovation in doom to not have lives. You know you could just play doom as long as you wanted you just restart at the start of the level. Now more fun is had when you just let people kind of keep trying when they're stuck rather than having to go all the way back and learn different things.

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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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