Carmack is an interesting choice here, oddly. He and team were among the first ones there, but it isn't like they weren't rapidly met. Nor, strictly, the first. Ultima Underworld, I'm pretty sure, has a bit of that distinction.
Even more impressive, much of the success of later titles came from his picking the likes of Abrash to help make things fast. Notably, the WTF comment in the "fast square root" trick was from Carmack about a contractor's code that was speeding things up.
Getting even more meta on it, they had amazing dev tools at their disposal that many other programmers just couldn't afford. Look at the recreations folks do nowadays using pico8 and friends. Some folks get some really amazing tricks running in that field.
None of which is to say Carmack is a bad dev. Quite the contrary, he is quite good. But don't discount the role of everything else to the early success that Doom and friends had. In particular, the artistic execution and vision of everyone else was probably worth more than you'd consider.
Even more impressive, much of the success of later titles came from his picking the likes of Abrash to help make things fast. Notably, the WTF comment in the "fast square root" trick was from Carmack about a contractor's code that was speeding things up.
Getting even more meta on it, they had amazing dev tools at their disposal that many other programmers just couldn't afford. Look at the recreations folks do nowadays using pico8 and friends. Some folks get some really amazing tricks running in that field.
None of which is to say Carmack is a bad dev. Quite the contrary, he is quite good. But don't discount the role of everything else to the early success that Doom and friends had. In particular, the artistic execution and vision of everyone else was probably worth more than you'd consider.