There's no denying that id co-founder John Carmack is a genius. There are few people in the gaming industry that can stand up and deliver a keynote chock full of geekery, stats, and off-handed comments about something incredible they coded in their free time. Will Wright is one of them, and so is Carmack. His QuakeCon 2010 keynote speech, which was preceded by the news that there would be no Doom 4 news despite them telling us last year that there would be (grrr), was full of heady terms like "Vertex Index Buffers" and refresh rates on high-definition televisions. 

Carmack surprised everyone by pulling out his iPhone and showing off Rage running at 60fps, and then he launched into a non-stop geek explosion about everyone from Apple to high definition televisions to what's coming next in the world of PC gaming. It's pretty lofty stuff, but a lot of fun to listen to, and he would have kept on going if someone hadn't stopped him. Boot yourself up some Quake 4, and listen to the audio below to hear things like:

• How Rage should be out first on the iPhone, will be hundreds of MBs in size, and will have an option to run at 30fps so it doesn't chew up your battery
• Why Apple isn't a gaming company
• Why he likes developing on the iPhone platform
• How change in computing has a detrimental effect on game design
• Why he's a graphics geek
• Why consoles are at the top of gaming
• How he reads line by line commentary on Unix in his spare time
• Why they got 'dinged' so bad about Doom 3 being so dark
• Why virtualizing graphic cards is the way of the future
• How he was surprised to learn that id had hit both the power and cooling limits of their building. "That was something that never would have occurred to me!"

The full audio of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2010 keynote is available here: Right-click and Save