John Carmack
More info
- Born
- Known for
- The engines behind Doom and Quake
- Nationality
- American
Made 1990s PC hardware do things it was not built for — and then released the source code to the engines.
At id Software, Carmack wrote the rendering engines for Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Each title turned on a trick that worked around the hardware's limits: side-scrolling on the PC via selective redrawing, raycasting for pseudo-3D, and with Quake, true polygonal 3D with precomputed lighting.
He pushed early for OpenGL over competing APIs, and has consistently open-sourced older engines — which turned them into study material for a whole generation. From 2013 to 2022 he was CTO at Oculus working on VR latency; since then, on general AI.