Palmer Luckey Quotes

“Parents are happy I am doing what I love, maybe not so happy that all those videogames they told me were a waste of time ended up being as important as I always told them they would be!”

“I was interested in virtual reality for several years even before working at USC, it wasn't an interest that started there at all. In fact, when I started working at USC, I already had prototypes of the Rift that were very similar to the final design.”

“There are times, especially when I was just getting into PC gaming, where I spent way less time playing than obsessing about the quality of the play.”

“I'm a huge gamer. I'm very excited, and the idea of the Rift was as a headset that was designed around the specific uses of VR gaming. But I'm excited about a lot of stuff that's outside of it, because I was a VR enthusiast. I want VR to be the thing that we all live in, that we all use for everything, not just games.”

“If I grew up in 'da hood,' it would make my story so much more interesting - if I had something to escape from. I had a pretty good life. My parents weren't rich; they weren't poor. I wasn't trying to escape from anything. It was always just the pursuit of something cooler.”

“Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.”

“I'm the most optimistic guy about VR out there. I have crazy visions of what we'll be doing in the future.”

“I've been a bit of an electronics enthusiast and maker for a long time. I actually started the forum called ModRetro. It's an electronics enthusiast community that focuses on modifying vintage game consoles, and it's actually one of the larger game console modification forums on the Internet.”

“I'm really familiar with what Cardboard's doing; it's not a novel concept. Cardboard is in many ways a direct ripoff of FOV2GO, a project I helped work on when I was at ICT, and it was fairly well known in the academic VR community.”

“Any real virtual reality enthusiast can look back at VR science fiction. It's not about playing games... 'The Matrix,' 'Snow Crash,' all this fiction was not about sitting in a room playing video games. It's about being in a parallel digital world that exists alongside our own, communicating with other people, playing with other people.”

“Self-taught! Explore the world around you, take things apart, put 'em back together. You can learn a lot if you do nothing but spend your entire life in your garage working on projects or in your room reading on the Internet.”

“Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever and change the way we work, play and communicate.”

“I wanted to prove that I wasn't a one-hit wonder. That I was still somebody.”

“I had this belief that the major defense companies didn't have the right talent or the right incentive structure to invest in things like artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics. And the companies that did have expertise, like Google, like Facebook, like Apple, were refusing to work with the U.S. national security community.”

“People say it's spooky to have autonomous weapons. It's spookier to fight the Third World War with dumb ones.”

“The first page of our first pitch deck said that Anduril is a company that will save Western civilization by saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens of billions of dollars a year. We're not making tens of billions of dollars a year yet. But we're getting there.”

“Palmer described the Rift in such a compelling way that we wanted to do it without even seeing it. We thought, Why not?”

“When I work I am extremely self-controlled. But when I am not working it is an entirely different story. I don't care about how people look at me and about how they think about me.”