From Kansas to AGI.
A self-taught programmer who became a reference: video games, amateur aerospace, virtual reality, artificial intelligence.
The early years (1970-1991)
Born in Kansas in 1970, Carmack was programming on the Apple II as a teenager. At Softdisk in the late 1980s, he worked out smooth scrolling on the PC, adaptive tile refresh, and met John Romero, Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack, with whom he founded id Software in 1991.
id Software (1991-2013)
With Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993) and Quake (1996), Carmack invented or popularized, in quick succession, textured ray casting, binary space partitioning (BSP) rendering, and then true real-time polygonal 3D. He also championed a culture of openness, releasing the source code of his engines under the GPL.
Rockets and VR (2000-2022)
In parallel, he founded Armadillo Aerospace in 2000, an amateur rocketry venture. In 2013 he became CTO of Oculus VR, shaping the software architecture of mobile virtual reality until his departure in 2022.
Artificial intelligence (since 2022)
Since 2022, Carmack has led Keen Technologies, focused on artificial general intelligence. He approaches the field with the same method: start from first principles, write a lot of code, measure.
John Carmack at QuakeCon (2008). Photo: Drew Campbell / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
Armadillo Aerospace, the rockets.
Around 2000, Carmack returned to a childhood passion: rocketry. He began by funding a few amateur engineers near him, then founded Armadillo Aerospace, paying for it entirely out of his own pocket, in his own words "something north of a million dollars a year".
The team, a group of hobbyists, made steady progress toward suborbital flight, with orbit as the distant goal. In October 2008, Armadillo took first place in Level 1 of NASA's Lunar Lander Challenge and $350,000. In September 2009 it completed Level 2 and collected $500,000. The company went into hibernation in 2013, the same year he left id Software.
He drew from it a remark that says a great deal about how he ranks difficulty: aerospace work is, in his view, "simple" compared with what he does in video games.
The ZeniMax lawsuit.
Carmack left id Software in 2013 because ZeniMax Media, the parent company, would not back the Oculus Rift. The disagreement turned into litigation.
In May 2014, ZeniMax wrote to Facebook and its Oculus VR subsidiary claiming that Carmack's contributions to the Rift belonged to it, then filed suit. Oculus answered in June that ZeniMax was asserting imaginary ownership to profit from the Facebook acquisition, and that no code was shared between the two.
The February 2017 verdict is more nuanced than the usual summary suggests. The jury rejected the gravest charge, misappropriation of trade secrets. It did find violations of copyright, trademarks and a non-disclosure agreement, and awarded ZeniMax $500 million.
Above all, and this is what summaries leave out: the jury absolved Carmack of personal liability. Only Oculus and other corporate officers were held responsible.
That same month, Carmack sued ZeniMax in turn, claiming the $22.5 million still owed to him from the purchase of id Software. In October 2018 he announced that an agreement had been reached and that ZeniMax had fully satisfied its obligations to him.
Frequently asked questions.
Who is John Carmack?
John Carmack (born 1970) is an American programmer and a co-founder of id Software. He engineered the engines behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, transformed real-time 3D rendering, then led engineering at Oculus VR before turning to artificial intelligence.
What are his most important games?
Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) stand out: each pushed real-time 3D rendering and first-person shooter culture a decisive step forward.
Why is he associated with open source?
Carmack had the source code of several id Software engines (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and later titles) released under the GPL, enabling ports, preservation and community innovation.
What is he doing now?
Since 2022 he has led Keen Technologies, a company focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI), after serving as CTO of Oculus VR from 2013 to 2022.
Is this an official archive?
No. It is an independent project with no affiliation to John Carmack, id Software, Meta or Keen Technologies. Information draws on public sources and should be cross-checked.