John Carmack

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Carmack was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, the son of local television news reporter Stan Carmack. He 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 Raytown, Missouri. He was introduced to video games with Space Invaders in the arcades as a child. Pac-Man also left a strong impression on him. He cited Shigeru Miyamoto as the game developer he most admired. At age 14, he broke into a school to steal Apple II computers, was arrested, and sentenced to a year in a juvenile home. He attended the University of Missouri–Kansas City for two semesters before withdrawing to work as a freelance programmer. He was hired by Softdisk, where he met John Romero and Adrian Carmack. At Softdisk, he and others created the first Commander Keen game. He left Softdisk to co-found id Software. Carmack has pioneered or popularized many techniques in computer graphics, including adaptive tile refresh for Commander Keen, ray casting for Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3-D, and Wolfenstein 3D, binary space partitioning which Doom became the first game to use, surface caching which he invented for Quake, Carmack's Reverse for Doom 3, and MegaTexture technology first used in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Quake 3 popularized the fast inverse square root algorithm. Carmack's engines have been licensed for use in other first-person shooters such as Half-Life, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. In 2005, he developed Doom RPG for mobile phones. In 2013, he joined Oculus VR as CTO and resigned from id Software to work full-time at Oculus VR. In 2019, he reduced his role to Consulting CTO to allocate more time toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). In 2022, he left Oculus to work on his AGI startup, Keen Technologies. In September 2023, he partnered with computer scientist Richard S. Sutton to help further AI research efforts. Carmack funded Armadillo Aerospace out of his own pocket. The company won first place in the Level 1 competition of NASA's Lunar Lander Challenge in October 2008, and completed Level 2 in September 2009. The company went into hibernation mode in 2013. Carmack is an advocate of open-source software and has opposed software patents. He released the source code for Wolfenstein 3D in 1995 and the Doom so

In Their Own Story

The terminal screen glows with a stark green cursor against the black void of the source code. John Carmack sits in the dim light of the office, fingers flying across the keyboard as he refines the BSP tree algorithm. The hum of the server room is a constant backdrop to his focus; every line of C++ written here will soon dictate how millions of players perceive depth and distance in a digital world. He does not see monsters or maps yet, only the mathematical precision required to make them feel real.

Reader's Guide

Carmack claims to have maintained a sixty-hour work week, working a 10-hour day, six days a week, throughout his career. He has spoken about the importance of long hours of uninterrupted focus. He is known for taking week-long programming retreats involving solitary, uninterrupted periods away from his normal routine. He was vocal about his frustration with bureaucratic inefficiencies at Meta. He subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful innovation.

Did You Know?

• Carmack invented surface caching for Quake, not Quake II.
• Binary space partitioning was first used in Doom, not Quake.
• The fast inverse square root algorithm was popularized by Quake III Arena, not earlier id games.
• Carmack's Reverse algorithm is formally known as z-fail stencil shadows.

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