JOHN D. CARMACK

'John D. Carmack II' (born August 20 1970) is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. A prolific American programmer, Carmack co-founded id Software, a computer game development company, in 1991. Carmack was the lead programmer of the highly successful id computer games ''Commander Keen'', ''Wolfenstein 3D'', ''Doom'', ''Quake'', and subsequent sequels to ''Doom'' and ''Quake''. His revolutionary programming techniques, combined with the unique game designs of John Romero, led to a mass-popularization of the first-person shooter genre (FPS) in the 1990s.
Though Carmack is best known for his innovations in 3D graphics, he is also a rocketry enthusiast and the founder and lead engineer of Armadillo Aerospace. He has aspirations of suborbital space tourism in the short term, eventually leading to orbital space flights.

Contents

Youth

Game programming

Aerospace

Free software

Personal

Professional philosophy

Recognition

References

Further reading

External links

Articles

Youth

Carmack, son of local television news reporter Stan Carmack, grew up in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area where he became interested in computers at an early age. He attended Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas and Raytown South High School in nearby Raytown, Missouri. As reported in David Kushner's '', "when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school to steal Apple II computers, was arrested, and sent for psychiatric evaluation (the report mentions "no empathy for other human beings"). Carmack was then sentenced to a year in a juvenile home."^[1] After scoring a 1500 on the SAT, he attended the University of Missouri - Kansas City for two semesters before withdrawing to work as a freelance programmer.

Game programming

Softdisk, a computer company in Shreveport, Louisiana, hired Carmack to work on Softdisk G-S (an Apple IIGS publication), uniting him with John Romero and other future key members of id Software such as Adrian Carmack (not related). Later, this team would be placed by Softdisk in charge of a new, but short-lived, bi-monthly game subscription product called ''Gamer's Edge'' for the IBM PC (MS-DOS) platform. In 1990, while still at Softdisk, Carmack, Romero, and others created the first of the Commander Keen games, a series which was published by Apogee Software, under the shareware distribution model, from 1991 onwards. Afterwards, Carmack left Softdisk to co-found id Software, where he remains.
He has pioneered or popularised the use of many techniques in computer graphics, including "adaptive tile refresh" for Commander Keen, raycasting for ''Hovertank 3-D'', ''Catacomb 3-D'', and ''Wolfenstein 3-D'', binary space partitioning which ''Doom'' became the first game to use, surface caching which he invented for ''Quake'', Carmack's Reverse which he devised for ''Doom 3'', and MegaTexture, used in . While he was not the first to discover Carmack's Reverse, he developed it independently.
Carmack's engines have also been licensed for use in other influential first-person shooters such as ''Half-Life'' and ''Medal of Honor''.
When Carmack was on vacation with his wife, he ended up playing some games on her cellphone, and he realized that the games weren't any good. He then decided he was going to make a good mobile game. When he got back from his vacation he revealed that he had started working on ''Doom RPG''.^[2]

Aerospace

Around the year 2000, Carmack became interested in rocketry, a hobby of his youth. Reviewing how much money he was spending on customizing Ferraris, he realized he could do significant work in rocketry and Aerospace. He began by giving financial support to a few local amateur groups before starting Armadillo Aerospace. He taught himself rocket engineering and is the lead engineer of the company. Since then he has made steady progress toward his goals of suborbital space flight and eventual orbital vehicles.

Free software

Carmack is a well-known advocate of open source software, and has repeatedly voiced his opposition to software patents, which he equates to "mugging someone".^[3] He has also 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.
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'' and most recently ''Quake 3'', all under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The ''Doom'' source code was also re-released under the GPL in 1999.
Carmack is also noted for his generous contributions to charities and gaming communities. Some of the recipients of Carmack's charitable contributions include his former high school, promoters of free software, opponents of software patents, and game enthusiasts. In 1997 he gave away one of his Ferraris (a 328 model) as a prize to Dennis Fong, the winner of the ''Quake'' "Red Annihilation" tournament.

Personal

Carmack met his wife Katherine Anna Kang at QuakeCon 1997 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. At the time, female FPS computer gamers were more myth than reality. Kang's tournament had over 600+ registered female gamers trying to win a trip for 2 to California to win $2,000+ worth of prizes. Among them were Kornelia, KillCreek, and the PMS Clan: some of the most famed female players at the time. Carmack and Kang married in January 2000 and had a son in 2004.
In a QuakeFinger blog post, Carmack mentioned that he has "no belief in luck, fate, karma, or god(s)".^[4]
Carmack has a blog (previously a .plan), and also occasionally posts comments to Slashdot.

Professional philosophy

One of the aspects of Carmack's life which has set him apart from his rivals is the lack of a need for a final release date goal while developing a new game. When asked for a release date on a new title, Carmack has famously quipped that the game will be released "when it's done". Employees at Apogee, in their past years the publishers of games by iD Software, adopted this deontology too.

Recognition

★ In September 2007, Carmack appeared on Discovery Channel Canada Daily Planet, featuring his rocket designs along with the Armadillo Aerospace team.

★ In 1999, Carmack appeared as number 10 in TIME's list of the 50 most influential people in technology.[2]

★ On March 22, 2001, Carmack became the fourth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed upon those who have made revolutionary and innovative achievements in the video and computer game industry.

★ In 2003, Carmack was one of the subjects of the book '', a chronicle of id Software and its founders.

★ In 2005, the film ''Doom'' featured a character named ''Dr. Carmack'', in recognition of Carmack who co-created the original game.

★ In March 2006, Carmack was added to the Walk of Game, an event that recognizes the developers and games with the most impact on the industry.^[5]

★ In January of 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada, John Carmack and id software were awarded with two Emmy Awards. The Science, Engineering & Technology for Broadcast Television, which includes broadcast, cable and satellite distribution, and secondly, Science, Engineering and Technology for Broadband and Personal Television, encompassing interactive television, gaming technology, and for the first time, the Internet, cell phones, private networks, and personal media players. id Software is the very first independent game developer to be awarded an Emmy since the Academy began honoring technology innovation in 1948.^[6]

References

1. ''Masters of Doom'' by David Kushner. Quoted in The Weekly Standard, Vol. 012, Issue 23. [1]
2.
3. "Are video game patents next?" Slashdot article
4. http://www.celebatheists.com/index.php?title=John_Carmack
5. Walk of Game
6. Emmy Awards

Further reading

★ Kushner, David (2003). '', New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-50524-5.

External links

★ John Carmack's Blog

★ John Carmack's Blogged Dev Diaries

★ Doom and Quake creator's dev diaries are blogged

★ id Software's website

★ Armadillo Aerospace site

★ User Account on Slashdot

★ User Account on the Space Fellowship

★ Slashdot - John Carmack Answers

★ ''John Carmack'' profile on MobyGames

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Articles

★ "TIME Digital 50" snippet on Carmack

★ "The Age Of Doom", ''TIME'' article (2004)

★ "The Egos at id", a ''Wired'' magazine feature article (1996)

★ CES 2007 Interview

★ Slashdot interview

★ "MegaTexture" technology

★ "Carmack nails lid on PPU coffin"