This week, legendary game maker John Carmack accepted a fellowship from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for his pioneering work in game development since the early 1990s. Through his work on Wolfenstein 3d and Doom, Carmack helped create the first-person shooter genre, and today he has continued pushing the boundaries of game development through his role as CTO at Oculus VR.

While Carmack was glad to be part of the early days of PC game development, he said that he is not eager to return to that time, as he believes gaming has never been in a more exciting place than it is today.

“I make it a point not to romanticize the good old days because as we’ve seen things are amazing today, and we’re not in some fallen state from a better time,” Carmack said in his speech. “But there is something to be said for the early days when you’re working on a frontier, when you’re doing things that people haven’t done before and you don’t know what the right answers are.”

Carmack’s words seemed to echo a similar sentiment expressed by his colleague, Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash, who said on stage at Oculus Connect 2 that “these are the good old days” of VR development that people will fondly look back on in the future.

“The 90s PC wave was great,” Carmack added, “and I was happy to be there and I’m glad I took a swing and knocked one out of the park with that, but since then we’ve seen mobile games, web games, free-to-play games, the Steam revolution, and now virtual reality.”

“All of these are amazing, so yeah, the opportunities I had aren’t there anymore for people today, but there are new and better ones, and personally I’m more excited about these than anything that’s come before.”

You can watch Carmack’s acceptance speech, along with BAFTA’s profile and interview with him, below:

Screenshot via BAFTA | YouTube