John Carmack is a legendary person in gamingindustry. He came up with revolutionary programming techniques that made games more realistic. With his participation, such masterpieces as Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Doom and many others were created.
Carmack was born on August 20, 1970 in the suburbsKansas City (USA). As a child, John was fond of chemical experiments, simulated rockets, read fiction. But most of all he liked fantasy role-playing games, for example, Dungeons and Dragons.
With the advent of the computer age, Carmack's lifehas changed. He became obsessed with electronic gadgets, but parents could not buy an expensive toy. When the future genius was fourteen years old, he tried with a group of friends to steal the computers of Apple II from school. They were caught, and John Carmack spent the next year in a special institution for minors.
After liberation, Carmack became quiet and engagedprogramming. He learned to write codes on his own. Parents saw that his son had an unusual potential, and they cut out the means to buy the first computer.
After a failed study at the State UniversityMissouri John Carmack became a freelancer. For some time he worked as an independent contractor for Apple, but earned very little money. In the end, the young man got a job as a programmer at Softdisk. One of his first developments was the two-dimensional arcade Invasion of the Vorticons.
Carmack's colleagues were two obsessed with computersfan: John Romero (1967) and Adrian Carmack (1969). During the day they developed games for Softdisk, and at night they experimented with coding. Soon the friendly company created its video game called Commander Keen.
Inspired by the success of the game, the trio left Softdisk in order to form the ID Software company in 1991. Later, John Carmack and John Romero for decades will become fashion trendsetters in the gaming industry.
As young people, Carmack and Romero withpleasure played computer games. Especially they were carried away by the project Castle Wolfenstein. Soon they released their own version - Wolfenstein 3D. Three-dimensional image in the modern sense was not, but Carmack came up with technical tricks that created the illusion of volume. The hero examined the labyrinths of the Nazis, fought against enemies and collected treasures. The project overnight became incredibly successful. Thanks to the fact that the game was played by the first person, the players for the first time could feel themselves participants of realistic adventures. The gamer saw the world through the gun sight and could direct it to the target.
Wolfenstein was so popular that everyoneof its creators earned $ 120,000 per month. John Carmack, whose photo began to appear on the covers of publications, became a rich man at the age of 21.
However, the money little worried about John.He worked daily more than 8 hours to correct and improve the coding. In the ID world, a balanced, collected Carmack was the king of coding, embodying the ideas of three-dimensional reality into life. Romero was assigned the role of screenwriter, mastermind, responsible for the atmospheric games, landscape design and characters.
In 1993, the team released the revolutionary Doom hit.They created a three-dimensional virtual world so powerful, convincing and exciting that it changed the game industry. The plot of the game could fit in one and a half lines: the hero in the research center on Mars fights with the attacking demons. However, the graphic performance was truly unique, complex and very realistic for its time.
Prior to Doom, most video games were prettyflat and unrealistic. Carmack's programming techniques allowed the fantasy world to become more natural, detailed. In 1994, the project brought in $ 7 million in profit, despite the fact that the copies were sorely lacking. The game has become one of the best-selling in history. John Carmack and Romero became legends.
In 1996, the duo presented the game Quake.Gamers were offered an even higher level of realism. The multiplayer project became the legislator of the "arena" genre, when real players are fighting over the network with each other.
Quake became both a bestseller and a cultphenomenon. Quake II was released later - in 1996. Quake III Arena was released in 2000 and is an online game that allows a large number of participants to fight simultaneously.
John Carmack is involved in the development of 44 games. The most famous are:
Now Carmack oversees the project to develop pointsOculus Rift. He believes that the future is beyond virtual reality. It was incredibly captured by this idea - so much so that John left ID Software, which he gave the 22 best years of his life. Even earlier, the ways with John Romero broke up. Two creative personalities had too different views on the future of the gaming industry.
Carmack is an advocate of opensoftware. He made ID Tech 1, 2, and 3 available for download and said that eventually ID Tech 4 and ID Tech 5 would be open source. He also opposes the concept of patents in software.
John is married and has two children. His wife was Katherine Kang, who was the director of business development in ID Software.
