John Carmack co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels.
34 Facts About John Carmack
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John Carmack was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, the son of local television news reporter Stan John Carmack.
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John Carmack grew up in the Kansas City metropolitan area, where he became interested in computers at an early age.
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John Carmack attended Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas and Raytown South High School in nearby Raytown, Missouri.
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John Carmack was introduced to video games with the 1978 shoot 'em up game Space Invaders in the arcades during a summer vacation as a child.
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John Carmack cited Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto as the game developer he most admired.
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John Carmack was sentenced to a year in a juvenile home.
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John Carmack has pioneered or popularized the use of many techniques in computer graphics, including "adaptive tile refresh" for Commander Keen, ray casting for Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3-D, and Wolfenstein 3D, binary space partitioning which Doom became the first game to use, surface caching which he invented for Quake, John Carmack's Reverse which he devised for Doom 3, and MegaTexture technology, first used in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.
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John Carmack's engines have been licensed for use in other influential first-person shooters such as Half-Life, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor.
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In 2007, when John Carmack was on vacation with his wife, he ended up playing some games on his cellphone, and decided he was going to make a "good" mobile game.
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In February 2017, John Carmack sued ZeniMax, claiming the company had refused to pay him the remaining $22.5 million owed to him from their purchase of id Software.
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In October 2018, John Carmack stated that he and ZeniMax had reached an agreement and that "Zenimax has fully satisfied their obligations to me", ending the suit.
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On November 13,2019, John Carmack stepped down from the Oculus CTO role to become a "Consulting CTO" in order to allocate more time to his work on artificial general intelligence.
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On December 16,2022, John Carmack left Oculus to focus on Keen.
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John Carmack has maintained a sixty-hour work week, working a 10-hour day, six days a week, throughout his career.
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John Carmack has spoken publicly about the importance of long hours of uninterrupted focus in his work.
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The goal of these retreats is to allow John Carmack to operate at full cognitive capacity, tackling a specific, difficult problem or learning a new skill.
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John Carmack was vocal about his frustration with the bureaucratic inefficiencies he encountered during his time at Meta.
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John Carmack subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful and disruptive innovation.
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John Carmack compares this approach to the "magic of gradient descent" where small steps using local information result in the best outcomes.
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Around 2000, John Carmack became interested in rocketry, a hobby of his youth.
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John Carmack is an advocate of open-source software, and has repeatedly voiced his opposition to software patents, equating them to robbery.
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John Carmack has contributed to open-source projects, such as starting the initial port of the X Window System to Mac OS X Server and working to improve the OpenGL drivers for Linux through the Utah GLX project.
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John Carmack released the source code for Wolfenstein 3D in 1995 and the Doom source code in 1997, first under a custom license and then under the GNU General Public License in 1999.
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John Carmack has since expressed regret on using the copyleft GPL over the more permissive BSD license.
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John Carmack has since advised developers to be careful when utilizing middleware, noting how it can limit the possibilities of later releasing source code.
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John Carmack has continued to advise developers to be careful when depending on middleware, noting how it can limit the possibilities of later releasing source code, as well as maintaining good code quality and ensuring offline or third-party server support is available.
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John Carmack was so successful at id that by mid-1994 he had purchased two Ferraris: a 328 and a Ferrari Testarossa.
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John Carmack met his ex-wife Katherine Anna Kang, at the 1997 QuakeCon when she visited id's offices.
30.
John Carmack predicted a maximum of 25 participants, but there were 1,500.
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Steve Jobs requested that they would postpone the ceremony so John Carmack could attend the MacWorld Expo on January 5,2000.
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John Carmack reflected on the internal development of Quake in this regard and described it as "traumatic" and says id Software could have split the game into two parts and shipped it earlier.
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John Carmack supported the 2012 presidential campaign of Libertarian Ron Paul.
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John Carmack had been such a regular customer that they continued to charge him 1995 prices.