John Carmack

On November 13, 2019, Carmack announced that he is stepping down from the Oculus CTO role to become a "Consulting CTO" in order to allocate more time to his work on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

In February 2017, Carmack sued ZeniMax, claiming the company had refused to pay him the remaining $22.5 million owed him from their purchase of id Software. By October 2018, Carmack stated that he and ZeniMax reached an agreement and that "Zenimax has fully satisfied their obligations to me", ending the suit.

On occasion he has commended the efforts of similarly focused programmers — first Ken Silverman, who wrote the Build engine for 3D Realms, and later with Tim Sweeney of Epic Games, who writes the Unreal Engine.

He attended the University of Missouri–Kansas City for two semesters before withdrawing to work as a freelance programmer.

On August 7, 2013, Carmack joined Oculus VR as their CTO. On November 22, 2013, he resigned from id Software to work full-time at Oculus VR. Carmack's reason for leaving was because id's parent company ZeniMax Media didn't want to support Oculus Rift. Carmack's role at both companies later became central to a ZeniMax lawsuit against Oculus parent company Facebook, claiming that Oculus stole ZeniMax's virtual reality intellectual property. The trial jury absolved Carmack of liability, though Oculus and other corporate officers were held liable for trademark, copyright, and contract violations.

Carmack supported the 2012 presidential campaign of Republican Ron Paul.

Carmack's engines have also been licensed for use in other influential first-person shooters such as Half-Life, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. In 2007, when 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.

Around 2000, Carmack became interested in rocketry, a hobby of his youth. Reviewing how much money he was spending on customizing Ferraris, Carmack realized he could do significant work in hobby aerospace. He began by giving financial support to a few local amateur engineers. Carmack funded the company out of his own pocket, for "something north of a million dollars a year." The company of hobbyists made steady progress toward their goals of suborbital space flight and eventual orbital vehicles. In October 2008, Armadillo Aerospace competed in a NASA contest known as the Lunar Lander Challenge, winning first place in the Level 1 competition along with $350,000. In September 2009, they completed Level 2 and were awarded $500,000. The company went into "hibernation mode" in 2013.

He met his wife Katherine Anna Kang at the 1997 QuakeCon when she visited id's offices. As a bet, Kang challenged Carmack to sponsor the first All Female Quake Tournament if she was able to produce a significant number of participants. Carmack predicted a maximum of 25 participants, but there were 1,500. Carmack and Kang married on January 1, 2000 and planned a ceremony in Hawaii. Steve Jobs requested that they would postpone the ceremony so he could attend the MacWorld Expo on January 5, 2000. Carmack declined and suggested making a video instead. Carmack and his wife had a son in 2004. Carmack has a blog last updated in 2006 (previously a .plan), an active Twitter account, and also occasionally posts comments to Slashdot.

Carmack released the source code for Wolfenstein 3D in 1995 and the Doom source code in 1997. When the source code to Quake was leaked and circulated among the Quake community underground in 1996, a programmer unaffiliated with id Software used it to port Quake to Linux, and subsequently sent the patches to Carmack. Instead of pursuing legal action, id Software, at Carmack's behest, used the patches as the foundation for a company-sanctioned Linux port. id Software has since publicly released the source code to Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 and lastly Doom 3 (and later the BFG Edition), all under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The Doom source code was also re-released under the GPL in 1999. The id Tech 4 engine, more commonly known as the "Doom 3 engine", has also been released as open-source license under the GPL. The source code for Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D (as well as Carmack's earlier Catacomb) was released in June 2014 by Flat Rock Software with Carmack's blessing. On the other hand, Carmack has several times over the years voiced a skeptical opinion about Linux as a gaming platform; for instance in 2013 he argued for emulation "as proper technical direction for gaming on linux" and in 2014 he voiced the opinion that Linux might be the biggest problem for the success of the Steam Machine.

Carmack loves pizza. During his time at id Software, a medium pepperoni pizza would arrive for Carmack from Domino's Pizza almost every day, carried by the same delivery person for more than 15 years. Carmack had been such a regular customer that they continued to charge him 1995 prices.

Carmack was so successful at id that by mid-1994 he had purchased 2 Ferraris; a 328 and a Ferrari Testarossa. In 1997, he gave away one of his Ferrari (a 328 model) as a prize to Dennis Fong, the winner of the Quake tournament "Red Annihilation".

Softdisk, a computer company in Shreveport, Louisiana, hired Carmack to work on Softdisk G-S (an Apple IIGS publication), introducing him to John Romero and other future key members of id Software such as Adrian Carmack (not related). Later, Softdisk would place this team in charge of a new, but short-lived, bi-monthly game subscription product called Gamer's Edge for the IBM PC (DOS) platform. In 1990, while still at Softdisk, Carmack, Romero, and others created the first of the Commander Keen games, a series that was published by Apogee Software, under the shareware distribution model, from 1991 onwards. Afterwards, Carmack left Softdisk to co-found id Software.

Carmack was introduced to video games with the 1978 shoot 'em up title Space Invaders in the arcades during a summer vacation as a child. The 1980 maze chase arcade game Pac-Man also left a strong impression on him. He cited Shigeru Miyamoto as the game developer he most admired.

John D. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970) is an American computer programmer, video game developer and engineer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake and their sequels. Carmack made innovations in 3D graphics, such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes. In 2013, he resigned from id to work full-time at Oculus VR, where he served as CTO and later Consulting CTO in 2019.