
Id Software founder John Carmack resigns - footpath
http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/22/5134500/id-software-founder-john-carmack-resigns
======
Arjuna
Wow, I'm just now seeing this news. Initially, I had that _sinking feeling_
set in... I mean, like you, I have been impacted by his story, his games (not
just the Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake franchises... I'm talking Commander Keen, boys
and girls), his code, reading _Masters of Doom_ , etc.

I can see my copy of _Michael Abrash 's Graphics Programming Black Book
Special Edition_ sitting here, which was such a treat to read when it came
out, because it has so many great chapters on the development of Quake and
little stories about John's discoveries and thought processes throughout the
development of the game.

But, then I thought... wait... _this is a new beginning._ I wrote about this
previously, but, look for gaming to start heading in the direction of VR with
technology like Oculus Rift. Also, with someone of the caliber of John Carmack
involved (now totally focused on it because of the resignation announcement)
with not only his passion and skill, but his ability to work with graphics
hardware manufacturers and driver developers to effect change and garner the
necessary support and backing, expect to see vibrant, compelling developments
in this field.

In case you missed it, check this video out of John discussing some of his VR
work. It is from E3 2012:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg)

That momentary sinking feeling has faded away now... great things are ahead!

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Frankly, he's too talented to keep making mediocre shooters for twitch gamers.
Heck, 3D game engines are practically commodities nowadays. No idea if the
Oculus Rift will succeed, but I love it when people on his level take chances.
I watch the Rift project very carefully, and really see a lot of potential
there. It might not end up being what we expect it to be in the end. We assume
it'll be this great little game accessory like a Kinect. It has the potential
to be much more.

~~~
venomsnake
Poorly optimized 3d engines are a commodity. Quake 3, Painkiller and Serious
Sam 1 were a piece of great engineering. Also there was nothing mediocre in
the twitch based era of id. Their decline began with Doom 3.

~~~
c0nfused
So, a bit of a rant, I dislike the current game culture meme of "this engine
is poorly optimized". I am tired of seeing the following statement: game x is
poorly optimized because game y runs better on my box. This is akin to saying:
I find apples delicious, Oranges are terrible. Get apples noobs.

I would argue that the fact that you can drop in any one of a half dozen solid
engines based on your programming language of choice speaks to the fact that
they are commodities. At this point, for the vast majority of cases, it makes
as much sense to write a 3d game engine as it does to write your own web
server.

You can do it, but you could spend the time doing something that directly
relates to the product you want to sell instead.

~~~
phaus
I think you misunderstand that for a long time, Id Software has made a lot of
money turning 3d engines into a commodity. For John Carmack, the emphasis has
always been on developing new graphics technologies that advance the entire
gaming industry. He's first and foremost an engineer. He may have done a
significant amount of game design back in the day, but for at least a decade
he's primarily been focused on pushing the hardware to its limits. Since Doom
3, Id's games have pretty much been tech-demos for their engines. That's not
to say that Doom 3, Quake 4, and Rage weren't good games, its just that none
of them are truly memorable experiences like their older games were.

There are only a handful of major players that are making meaningful
contributions to the world of 3d engines. If companies like Epic, Id, Valve,
and Crytek didn't continue to develop new 3d engines, they wouldn't be a
commodity anymore.

Also, the Source, Unreal, Cry, and Id Tech 5 engines are still differentiated
from one another enough to warrant all four of them existing.

In short, I don't think 3d engines are a "solved" problem. Of course an indie
studio looking to publish its first 3d game should obviously use a readily
available engine, but the major studios still have good reasons to roll their
own.

~~~
mtdewcmu
I'd imagine that a lot of the need for new engines is driven by new hardware,
and it seems that the video hardware has stopped evolving at a rapid pace.
nVidia and AMD have been focused more on computation than graphics recently.

------
beloch
This is _fantastic_ news.

I loved Id back in the day. When all it took for a game studio to be great was
the most advanced code, Id was king! Then FPS games became more like movies,
and Id became a bit like Michael Bay. They still pushed the technology
forward, but almost everyone was making FPS's that had better plots,
characters, etc.. The technologies Id licenses to other game studios are put
to better use by them than in Id's own hands!

VR has been around for decades, but it has always _sucked_. Low resolution
displays and poor head-tracking have historically been problems, but _latency_
has long been a problem that trumped all others. Carmack and Oculus were
already working on getting Rift's latency down to levels that would make VR a
less nauseating experience for users.

This move just means Carmack is finding his work at Oculus more rewarding than
at Id. That means we can probably expect great things from Oculus in the near
future.

------
LandoCalrissian
I think this check had been in the mail for a while. He is clearly far more
excited these days about VR and where it can go. I'm sure he has more than
enough money too to never have to worry about working again if he wanted.

I really wish him the best of luck, truly one of my favorite people in tech. I
hope we still can get his annual keynotes, because they are great to listen
to.

~~~
kmfrk
It's weird they didn't designate him as "Spiritual Leader" instead or
something that fits him better long ago.

Everyone knew this, so it's weird it had to end in this drastic manner.

~~~
jfoster
Perhaps I'm unaware of the circumstances, but what about this is drastic? His
company got acquired, he stayed for a few years, and now he's moving on to the
next thing that excites him.

------
aryastark
First Winamp, and now John Carmack leaves id. This has been a brutal week.

On one hand, it's exciting to see John working on VR tech. I really do hope we
see something amazing out of it. But it still feels wrong, an id Software
without Carmack. Hopefully they can continue on and reclaim some of their
former glory as well, and let's hope Carmack keeps in the spotlight.

~~~
deletes
Both are positive things, the best Doom has already been made and Winamp
stagnated for years now.

Time to stop being lazy, learn foobar2000 and buy an Oculus Rift.

Too bad IdTech6 won't be as awesome as it could be, but again VR will be so
much better instead.

------
danso
Obligatory mention of "Masters of DOOM", the biography of Johns Carmack and
Romero:

[http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-
Cultu...](http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-
Culture/dp/0812972155)

Like reading iWoz... a lot of stories of brilliant engineering at an elite
level.

~~~
mg74
Seconded!

And I can recommend the audio version, Wil Wheaton does a great job.

------
leoc
Slightly testy tone in that iD statement, isn't there?

~~~
untog
Not sure why anyone is downvoting you- this is the quote:

"John Carmack, who has become interested in focusing on things other than game
development at id, has resigned from the studio,""

It does sound kind of testy/flippant to me. But it could be out of context.

~~~
kleiba
This is from his twitter:

 _I wanted to remain a technical adviser for Id, but it just didn 't work out.
Probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging._

And then:

 _If they don 't want me to talk on stage at Quakecon next year, we'll just
have to fill up the lobby like the old days. :-)_

~~~
justin66
I'm pretty sure they'd PAY him to talk at Quakecon. Although it's not a big
money event, so they'd probably just ask really nicely. :)

~~~
kazagistar
I am pretty sure there is 0 chance that I would pay attention to quakecon if
not for Carmack's talks.

~~~
charlieflowers
Amen. That is the biggest thing I'll miss as a result of him stepping down.
They'd really be screwing up their conference by taking him off the docket.

------
the_mat
This is the end for id.

The only thing id has had going for it are Carmack's engines. In recent years
his stuff has been as amazing as ever, but so many commercial engines are only
a fraction of a step behind, and the difference hardly matters.

Design-wise id is a complete mess. They're stuck back in the 1990s. RAGE
appears to have had no leadership and no vision, and the actual design work
that shipped is amateur-hour at best.

~~~
adventured
ZeniMax will fold the id software llc, keep anybody worth keeping, and work on
making money with the intellectual property (either internally or farming it
out). There's nothing else left at id that's worth what ZeniMax paid for the
company other than the IP and the game engine. I'm sure they knew the day
would come sooner than later that they'd lose the Carmack value factor in id.

------
venomsnake
This makes me happy. I have a feeling that iD were dragging John down. He
could always make a brilliant tech that they somehow always failed to makes
decent game of after q3 arena.

I really hope that he will be able to push the limits of possible about
graphics technology once again.

------
untog
Very happy for John - his early days were at the very forefront of PC game
development and while iD still does great stuff, video gaming is in a very
stable, iterative place right now.

Hopefully chasing this VR dream will take him back to those early pioneering
days.

------
salient
> John's work on id Tech 5 and the technology for the current development work
> at id is complete.

So he's leaving just before starting to work on the voxel/polygon id Tech 6
hybrid gaming engine. Darn it!

[http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2008/08/carmack-id-
tech-6-hybr...](http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2008/08/carmack-id-
tech-6-hybrid-rendering.html)

Hopefully id Software will continue that without him, but I doubt it.

~~~
leoc
It has to be uncertain whether iD's commitment to open-sourcing its engines
will continue after his departure, too.

~~~
pjmlp
Most likely not.

The FOSS culture is not part of the gaming industry.

------
melling
Carmack is going full-time and the company is doing a lot of hiring...

[https://careers.oculusvr.com/jobs/](https://careers.oculusvr.com/jobs/)

I'm not into VR, but this could be one of those "this changes everything"
moments.

------
eco
Off topic but why do so many people capitalize "id" as "iD"? I did myself
years ago as well but I have no idea why I did. None of their logos use that
capitalization and my memory of the early games is too poor to recall where,
if anywhere, it was written like that.

~~~
shrikant
I've seen this usage in the wild a few times. It makes me twitch just like
when someone types out "FireFox".

~~~
maaku
or "BitCoin"

------
endgame
I find it interesting that iD and Carmack are still described in terms of Doom
and Quake.

~~~
dasil003
They've embraced it to a large extent with a huge number of sequels. Aside
from that, Quake 3 is considered by many to be the apex of fast-twitch FPS
skill games. It certainly makes Call of Duty look like grandma's bridge club.

~~~
aryastark
Quake 3 was pure perfection. That game _never_ crashed. And I was playing on
Linux in the bad old days of the late '90s, when sound and graphics drivers
were spotty at best. I don't think we'll see anything like it again. It's a
FPS that plays more like an action arcade game than a simulator. It took some
of the elements of Quake 1 and 2 but placed them in a Snow Crash cyberpunk
world.

~~~
to3m
The Quake games probably never exposed any driver bugs, because they were the
games the driver authors used to decide which code paths to test, optimize,
and (in some cases) even which bits of the driver to actually write in the
first place. I wouldn't be so quick to infer anything either way, from the
fact they never crashed ;)

(I used to have a PowerVR PCX2. Its OpenGL driver did exactly what Quake II
needed - and absolutely nothing else. As I recall, they didn't even bother to
get the OpenGL screen savers working. I believe the Voodoo GL drivers "worked"
along similar lines.)

------
gagege
It's bittersweet for me. I grew up with id games and John Carmack has just
always been there as id's genius programmer guy. Feels like the end of an era.

On the other hand, John Carmack is working full time for Oculus VR!

~~~
erbo
Yes, as their CTO. Which makes me wonder if we've seen the last of his Code
God skills. (But maybe not...)

~~~
gagege
I seriously doubt it. You should read his tweets. He's still very much a
programmer.

~~~
erbo
I should add that I _hope_ we haven't seen the last of his Code God skills.
The title of "CTO" kind of scares me in that regard, unless, of course, Oculus
is still small enough that the CTO might still be expected to put his hands in
the source.

~~~
jmelloy
I don't believe he would take any job where he wasn't programming.

------
_random_
Basically confirms that VR is in the "Slope of Enlightment".

~~~
sixQuarks
"Slope of Enlightment" assumes that the peak excitement of the technology is
already behind us. I don't think we've seen that peak yet. VR in the 90s never
came close to living up to expectations and was a dud.

The peak is yet to come in my opinion. When the oculus consumer version comes
out, people are gonna go crazy and predict that we're all going to live in the
virtual world very soon. That won't pan out in the short-term, but we will
slowly get there. That's when the Slope of Enlightment will hit.

------
akurilin
John can make real impact on the videogame industry a second time at Oculus,
the same couldn't have been said about id. This is a win for everybody.

------
macspoofing
It doesn't seem like an amicable parting. You never want to have a guy like
Carmack just leave. He's a giant in your industry, he's popular and highly
respected and you gain a lot by having him be associated with your company. So
at the very least you give him a honorific title and invite him to all the
corporate parties. It didn't seem like this happened here.

------
nicholassmith
A developers developer taking the opportunity to flex his wings on something
new, what a fantastic turn of events for us all.

------
saturdaysaint
Sounds like good news - I'd rather see him working on core technologies that
can benefit all games than working on iD's games, which I'd characterize as
merely being "pretty good" (albeit very technically impressive).

------
billyjobob
In the early days of PC gaming John Carmack was a genius, and Quake 3 was his
masterpiece. I guess he is still a genius, but from an outsider's perspective
the advancements he has made since then don't seem to changed the world in the
same way.

Graphics get prettier, but gameplay stays the same, or even gets worse because
the prettier graphics require higher budgets which require lowest-common-
denominator appeal to recoup.

So it's good that he is trying something truly new now, where he has a chance
to make a difference again.

------
atburrow
It will be interesting to see how the future pans out for both companies. John
Carmack is a brilliant person and I think that Oculus VR will do very well
with him on board full time.

------
BuckRogers
This is a good thing. Carmack said at a recent Quakecon that he didn't let us
have a light on any gun in Doom 3 because he didn't want another light source
in his rendering..

this is a guy who has no business making games. And none of his games have
been good for a long time (and they were always pretty bland, Quake was the
peak).

Having Carmack out of id's games is a good thing. Having him geek out on
technical problems without being allowed in game design decisions of any sort
is also a good thing.

------
blah32497
What a strange move. Maybe he wasn't spending enough time at iD and was forced
to leave?

You'd think his having a leg in gaming and a leg in VR would create a
wonderful synergy. Knowing all the in's and out of both worlds he could have
insured great integration of Doom 4 with the Oculus rift - making sure iD was
on the technological forefront while the Oculus would have a great demo from
day 1.

(see the Leap Motion for an example of what happens when you don't have a good
demo day 1)

------
10098
I'm not sure how to feel about this... He's always been an inspiration to me.
But I don't really care about VR tech, and would much rather see Carmack
working on games (at id or any other company). But I wish him success anyway.

------
marksands07
I guess I should feel dumb, because I thought Carmack left id when he joined
OculusVR.

------
ogreyonder
Am I the only one surprised to find that Carmack was still working for iD? I
had thought his taking a position with OculusVR implied his departure months
ago.

~~~
barnabask
I felt the same way when he was doing Armadillo Aerospace too. There are more
people than JC who have said: "I invented some cool tech, made a lot of money,
started a family, and also I think I'll start a rocket company on the side."
How much time/energy to these people have? This is like a thing now.

~~~
cfreeman
Well apparently he didn't really have the time/energy to keep AA going.

------
avoutthere
This is truly the end of an era. John's work has given me countless hours of
joy and I look forward to seeing what he produces next.

------
benmorris
Initially this is depressing until you see where he is going. I think Oculus
and VR in general will change the gaming industry.

------
BlackDeath3
Wherever he goes, he shall kick ass. Best wishes, Carmack!

------
squozzer
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.

------
na85
At first I was elated, but then I realized I was confusing Carmack with the
egotistical John Romero.

------
mkramlich
It's a little sad news but exciting as well. I'd rather see John's mind
helping push VR/AR and 'cheaper/nimbler/entrepeneurial/hacker-maker/DIY'
aerospace forward than churning out yet another 3D FPS game. We have tons of
great games/engines of that type already to choose from, and lots of great
people continuing to work in that space.

------
mkramlich
smells like vesting and/or end of golden handcuffs period (in the context of
the prior Betheseda -> iD acquisition)

~~~
hide_nowhere
Agreed.

He and the rest of iD seemed to have lost themselves once Bethesda came into
the picture, but these types of things are almost a certainty after a big M/A
event. Good luck to John!

