This guy helped invent the FPS genre and all the technology it took to make it, back in the MSDOS days - which is pretty incredible if you knew what he had to work with in terms of CPU and memory back in those days. Like Dave Cutler, never a guy to toot his own horn much either. Well done John, thank you for all your contributions to the tech and the craft.
I find it curious, but perhaps inevitable, that someone like John Carmack requires this introduction. If you played videogames in the 90s / early 00s or were at all interested in 3D programming, it was impossible not to have heard of him. He was (is?) probably one of the cleverest programmers of his time.
This article of his gets reposted time and time again to HN, which makes sense because it's very interesting. This is the first time I've noticed people not knowing who the author was.
I wonder if a few decades from now, tech-minded people will wonder who Linus Torvalds, Brian Kernighan or Dennis Ritchie were. I suppose they will!
I don't think it's uncommon for people to learn from the top down and after some time and a bit if passion find themselves digging into the roots of it.
It came across as a tad condescending although I can easily believe it wasn't meant that way and you are just open mindedly sharing perspective as is the point of all this.
I reply not to just make that comment but actually to recommend a book (that many may have possibly already read) which gives a rich history well worth it.
While I knew of Carmack and Torvalds, I only recently read a bit about Kernighan and Ritchie. And that was only because I got roped into doing some maintenance on a rather old system, programmed in C, which used a syntactic style that I hadn't encountered before. A bit of research on some of the structures I saw lead me to pre-ISO standardization of the C language, where the closest thing to a standard was a book written by those two, and the resulting pseudo-standard referred to as K&R C.
I bailed out of that project as soon as humanly possible, by the way. Not just because of the ancient language, but the entire organizational structure of both the codebase and the team itself.
Wouldn't label him a GOAT as such as he merely created Windows NT. OTOH, Carmack is on a whole other level altogether, it is unfair to list both of them together.
He did VMS too, and the hypervisor for Azure, and the hypervisor for XBox One.
"Soon after, and a few months before his 70th birthday, Cutler joined the team. He soon “set the bar for how hard people should work and how high they should hold the quality bar,” Multerer said. Two years later, on Nov. 22, 2013, Xbox One shipped in North America.
“Dave designed and wrote the hypervisor for Xbox One,” Multerer said, with an obvious sense of awe. “He wrote the entire bottom of the stack. Because the hypervisor is there, Xbox games can run on Windows. That’s why apps run on Xbox One. The impact of that work is phenomenal. And the amount of work he did was phenomenal.”"
I've been reading the book about the Wolf3d engine lately to remind me how insane those days were. The way he made it all work is staggering. I wonder how different video games would be if Carmack never took up the mantle he did. Would someone else have filled in, and if so how many years later would it have been?
For that time period Ultima Underworld was developed at the same time as Wolf3d and had a more feature packed if less performant renderer so not long is the answer. Then System Shock only came out a year or so later!
Carmack definitely deserves all the praise he gets but there were a lot of other people pushing the technical boundaries in all sorts of ways.
I think it's easy to overstate the impact first-movers have on any given industry. The 3D FPS genre was already being explored in the 70s and it's a somewhat obvious direction to explore on the PC as the hardware becoming ubiquitous in American homes matured enough to make it possible.
Carmack is a smart guy but it's not like there wasn't going to be a competitive PC game industry in his absence. Ken Silverman or Tim Sweeney come to mind as alternative first-movers in the space, I don't think it would have been much later.
The games might have been less violent for a bit longer without id though.
> The games might have been less violent for a bit longer without id though.
Probably not. They were just channeling the culture which was a lot of heavy metal and horror/action movies. Personally for me in my early teens it was a nice outlet for feeling powerful in a game rather than bullying some kids at school or whatever.
Releasing the source code for Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 was very much a Carmack thing. Source code releases for extremely successful, closed, commercial projects remains very uncommon (though it is fair to point out that the current Unreal Engine code is published.)
We'll never know is the real answer. How sooner would the modern lightbulb have been invented without Edison, the affordable automobile without Ford, etc. He put in the work and made it happen before anyone else, and that's damned important IMO.
