John Carmack

We were happy with funding 'Rage' on our own nickel for years. We intended to do the same with 'Doom 4'. We had offers early on for 'Rage'. People offered us X million dollars. But we carried the risk, and when we finally signed a deal, it was X plus $10 million.

It is true that the gameplay for 'Orcs&Elves' was designed around the limitations of mobile phones, and that if we were starting completely from scratch for the DS, we would probably do things a bit differently, but the bottom line is that when we sit a random DS player down with the game, they have a lot of fun.

I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way... so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people.

You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.