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| Smart Computing® Encyclopedia |
| John Carmack | ||
| John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, helped spark a new branch of gaming
software when he programmed the first highly successful 3D first-person
shooter game, Doom. Carmack remains the lead programmer and owner of id
(pronounced to rhyme with “did”), which he officially co-founded Feb. 1,
1991, with Adrian Carmack and John Romero. All three men had been working at
Softdisk. Carmack’s list of successful gaming software is extremely impressive. In the 1990s, Carmack and others at id developed the software engine that drove famous software packages such as Doom, Castle Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake. With the release of Wolfenstein 3D by Apogee in May 1992, id Software greatly raised the standards for games because of its 3D environment. Id released Doom, one of the most popular games of all time, Dec. 10, 1993. Doom’s first-person perspective was mind-blowing and was something no other company or game could match. Doom also popularized the ability to play a game head-to-head over a network (and, later, over a modem). The shareware version of Doom was uploaded to the University of Wisconsin’s FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site during the night, and subsequent downloading overwhelmed the site. The name Doom reportedly came from a line in “The Color of Money,” a movie Carmack watched while he was developing the game engine. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are in the Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame. Although Carmack is revered among fans of the first-person shooting software, others go so far as to blame Carmack and his colleagues for promoting violence among youths. The first-person shooter games Carmack and id have developed depict strong cartoon violence. Carmack’s id Software, named after the part of the human psyche that Freud identified, has its headquarters in a black glass building in Mesquite, Texas. Beyond creating extremely popular games, id Software also has been a successful pioneer at using nontraditional channels for software distribution, such as shareware Web sites and online services. Even in his grade-school days, Carmack says he knew he wanted to be computer programmer. He dropped out of college to form id. Carmack is a self-taught programmer. | ||
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