Carmack: Thinking “Consoles are basically as good as PCs” was a “big mistake”
Simon Williams August 20, 2011 - 3:00 pmTreating consoles and PC as equals was “one of the biggest mistakes I made in this generation,” John Carmack has admitted, and says that he would develop RAGE “very differently” for consoles now.
John Carmack is nothing if not refreshingly honest, and he’s been reflecting on where he went wrong when developing RAGE across PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
“What I look back as one of the biggest mistakes I made in this generation,” Carmack says, “was at the beginning, five or six years ago, looking and saying, “Consoles are basically as good as PCs,” at the time, and developing the workflow so it worked across both of them.”
The id Software technical genius admits that he underestimated just how much progress PC technology would make during RAGE’s protracted development: “Looking back now, we have PCs that are an order of magnitude more powerful, and if our workflow is instead focused on explicitly on just… you build and develop on the PC,” he told Gamasutra, “and you decimate things into a target for the consoles.”
“There are things that I would do very differently,” he concluded.
