Q: As for your PC work, Doom 3 was a sort of one-stop shop for anyone wanting to know about cutting edge visual and physics effects. Do you use your games to test the latest developments in hardware and programming, or do you start at the game and only use technology to facilitate your design ideas?

John Carmack: In the past, we have clearly bent the game around the most impressive technology we can produce, but that is changing to a degree. There is so much flexibility and power available now that there aren't a whole lot of beneficial trades that we can do to make something radically better by restricting the game design in a particular way, so the game design is a lot less technology driven than it used to be.

Q: What challenges do you think there are left for you in games programming? What are you learning about next?
John Carmack: If it weren't for Moore's law changing the playing field continuously, I would have been long gone. The rapid pace of hardware evolution still keeps things fresh for me. I am having a fine time working on the Xbox 360 graphics architecture right now, but I would be bored out of my skull if I was writing the twentieth iteration of user keyboard configuration code.

Outside of game programming, I have been getting a lot of satisfaction from the engineering work at Armadillo Aerospace.