Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And if you learn any engineering discipline, you learn massive amounts of math and you learn the rigor of problem solving, you know, not just what you find from the Wikipedia article, but going through all the exercises of solving complex problems and building up series of solutions to derive an answer. It's valuable and it embodies the knowledge that you need as a programmer.
And, you know, people often go to university and think, okay, my goal here is to get good grades so I get a diploma and I prove to an employer that I'm valuable. Like, no, that's just kind of the superficial bookkeeping of the university. The real purpose of all of this is to learn. And whether you learn formally or you learn on your own, it's the learnings that are really valuable in a career.
And especially if you're going to be an entrepreneur, it's really knowing the stuff that matters and not having the diplomas and to... There's ever more pressure to rebuild society, more and more around credentials. Do you have this certificate? Do you have that proof?
But companies that are focused on just building great products and doing great things gravitate towards people who do the great work.
I think this is something that's kind of changing in America. There's so much focus on grades and homework and structure around kids' lives. When I was growing up, my neighbors and moms would feed them breakfast, and they'd be like, well, be back by dark. Yeah. And, you know, we'd go out and we'd play and we'd do all sorts of things. We'd explore the woods. We'd build go-karts.
We'd salvage old pieces of electronics and build what we thought were our spacecraft control panels for the fake spaceships we were building as play. And we'd have an enormous amount of freedom. And, you know, from basically being a little kid through... through the time I went off to college, it had an enormous amount of free time. Some people just used that and wasted it and watched TV.
Some people socialized. And some people really got into serious projects. So many people at all times were doing cool things. I was programming. I was learning to build things. Before I was releasing games to the world, I'd be like... Having neighborhood folks over to play the things I was working on and check them out. Sometimes they're impressed, and sometimes they weren't.
They'd have their own projects. Often we'd have spare time jobs, and everybody was entrepreneurial. Everybody had a side gig. Sometimes you'd go around and mow people's lawns, or you'd rake the leaves up and earn money. There's freedom there. organic learning that occurred there, I think it's something that is really critical to the American experience.
Our worry is increasingly going away as society is ever more protective and sheltering and makes it harder to get these experiences.
I've had a funny relationship with games because my real aspiration was has always been to program cool stuff. I get more enjoyment out of programming than anything else in the world. And so my first really too formative experience with games were playing this game called Adventure for the Atari 2600.
It was like, you move this dot around the screen and picked up objects like swords and fought dragons and invaded castles and solved puzzles. Very, very simple, iconic stuff, rather than realistic graphics. And then the other game that really got immersed in was Zork, which was a text adventure game.
It would tell you where you are and what you see, and you'd type in commands like go north or pick up sword or open door and explore a world that way. So the game didn't have any graphics, but in your mind you had this elaborate picture of what you were seeing there, and it really brought in inspired imagination more than other things.
And playing those games led me to often want to learn to program everything I saw there. And that drove a lot of my programming. I learned how to move a player around the screen. I learned how to, you know, build a design tool so I could build castles and save them off and play them in a game.
And I realized there was a separation between the tools that you use to build a game and the game itself, and that the more powerful tools you had, the more creativity you could unleash in yourself or others. And I learned all the programming techniques that supported games, how to parse text, pick up sword and go north.
How do you make that sentence into an actual series of commands on the computer? And that was really, really exciting. I have to say, until the time that Fortnite came out, I played video games primarily to learn what they were doing so that I could go off and do it myself. I'd sit down when Wolfenstein came out and then Doom came out. I'd go through and look at it pixel by pixel.
I'd move the mouse very slightly and look at exactly what was happening to figure out what technique was being used there. That was puzzle solving at a grand scale, and it was so fun.
It was a funny project because I didn't start out to build a video game. I'd just moved from an Apple II. So my brother bought my family an Apple II right after I'd visited him in California. So I'd been programming on that for a few years, learned a lot of techniques, but there weren't many Apple II users around still by the time that cycle came to an end. So I'd just gotten an IBM PC of my own.
I was learning to program, and I realized I needed a text editor. So I started writing a text editor, A text editor is a program to edit text files. You have logic to move the cursor around and let people type things and backspace and delete and do all those mundane actions. One night, I had finished it up, and I was like, well, okay, I have a text editor, but this is pretty boring.
So I made the cursor into a smiley face character, and I had the different characters you could place in this document perform different gameplay actions. Some would be walls, and some would kill you, and some would be moving objects that could fly around the screen. And so this text editor I made evolved into a little game editor, so I was building these levels for a game.
I put a lot of time into building an editor and a primitive set of objects, about 20 or 30 different objects, enough to build a really cool and compelling game, but not so many that players would lose track of what they're seeing. I started off just building different game levels. The idea is you'd be on a series of boards.
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