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United States John Carmack has significantly advanced computer graphics and virtual reality technologies, a journey from pioneering video games to leading artificial intelligence research.
Co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels.
He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels. He was working with Oculus on VR technology while still employed at id Software -- which is owned by Zenimax, leading to Zenimax's claims of rights ownership. After nearly 10 years, John Carmack's time helping to guide VR hardware efforts at Meta (and at Facebook/Oculus before that) have come to a close.
John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI (globenewswire.com). Carmack is partnering with Richard Sutton, chief scientific advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute in Canada.
After nearly 10 years, John Carmack's time helping to guide VR hardware efforts at Meta (and at Facebook/Oculus before that) have come to a close.
John Carmack II, born on August 21, 1970, in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, developed an early interest in computers. His childhood fascination evolved into a career marked by significant contributions to the video game industry and beyond. In his early days, Carmack attended the University of Missouri–Kansas City for two semesters before leaving to pursue freelance programming. This led him to Softdisk, a computer company in Shreveport, Louisiana. There, he met John Romero and other future key members of id Software, a company he would later co-found. While at Softdisk in 1990, Carmack, Romero, and their team created the first of the “Commander Keen” games, which were published by Apogee Software.
Carmack co-founded id Software and served as the lead programmer for a series of influential games in the 1990s, including “Commander Keen,” “Wolfenstein 3D,” “Doom,” and “Quake.” He introduced several groundbreaking techniques in computer graphics, such as “adaptive tile refresh” for “Commander Keen,” ray casting for “Hovertank 3D” and “Wolfenstein 3D,” and binary space partitioning, first implemented in “Doom.” His “Carmack’s Reverse” algorithm (z-fail stencil shadows) was developed for “Doom 3,” and MegaTexture technology debuted in “Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.” Beyond his direct work, Carmack’s engines were licensed for use in other major first-person shooter titles, including “Half-Life,” “Call of Duty,” and “Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.” In 2005, he developed his first mobile game, “Doom RPG.”
In 2013, Carmack transitioned to Oculus VR as their CTO, focusing entirely on virtual reality technology. His departure from id Software was prompted by ZeniMax Media’s reluctance to support Oculus Rift. By 2019, he shifted to a Consulting CTO role at Oculus to dedicate more time to artificial general intelligence (AGI). In 2022, he departed Oculus to establish Keen Technologies, an AGI startup. In September 2023, he partnered with AI researcher Richard S. Sutton to further AI research efforts. Alongside his tech career, Carmack founded Armadillo Aerospace, a company focused on suborbital space flight, which entered “hibernation mode” in 2013 after winning Level 1 and Level 2 of NASA’s Lunar Lander Challenge in 2008 and 2009, respectively. He is also a notable advocate for open-source software.
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