John Carmack and Joe Rogan Discussed The Current State Of Games

The legendary game designer John Carmack, one of the creators of Doom and Wolfenstein dev studio id Software, visited the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and you don’t want to miss it. One of the topics that came up was Carmack’s thoughts on the current state of games today. He said he’s generally optimistic, though he has some reservations as well.

Carmack shared a couple of thoughts on the current state of games today, saying that he’s generally optimistic, but he also has some reservations. The designer thinks that games used to have more of a “distinct flavor.” There wasn’t this high level of focus-testing that we see in modern games, and this might be one of the reasons as some modern games are “focus-grouped to death.”

“One of the interesting things as we look at game design today versus the old days is a lot of people fall into a 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,” Carmack noted. “I tend to be more optimistic about the state of things today.”

He also noted that the amount of effort that goes into modern games is quite extraordinary. “The detail and all the quality on all the different levels. 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.”

Make to watch the full show and discuss it in the comments.