Lex Fridman: So of all the code you've written, is there any that you particularly like?
Carmack: I think the vertex groodlizer from Quake is probably the code I'm most proud of. See, it turns out that the Pentium takes a few cycles too long to render each frame and fails to hit its timing window unless the vertices are packed in canonically groodlized format. So I took a weekend, 16-hour days, and just read the relevant papers and implemented it in code over that weekend, and it basically saved the whole game.
The point being that not only is he a genius, but he also has an insane grindset that allows him to talk about doing something incredibly arcane and complex over a weekend -- devoting all his time to it -- the way you and I talk about breakfast.
