John Carmack
John Carmack (born August 20, 1970) is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. A prolific programmer, Carmack co-founded id Software, a computer game development company, in 1991. Carmack is noted as a leading figure in the field of game programming for his aptness with 3D graphics and optimization. He has been referred to as "the human compiler" for the latter.
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Biography
John D. Carmack II grew up in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, part of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, and became interested in computers at an early age. He graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School, then attended the University of Kansas for two semesters before dropping out to work as a freelance programmer. Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana hired Carmack uniting him with John Romero and other future members of id Software. At Softdisk, they produced the first of the Commander Keen series of games in 1990 before Carmack and the rest of the team left to create id.
Carmack\'s programming skills enabled the development of the seminal first-person shooter games Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake, amongst others. Carmack's game engines have been able to take advantage of the developments in PC hardware quicker than other developers. He has invented several computer graphic algorithmic techniques, notably surface caching and Carmack's Reverse.
Recognized as a technical leader in the video game industry, Carmack's engines have been licensed and put to use in some of the most influential first person action shooter games in the genre's history such as Half-Life and Medal of Honor.
Along with Linus Torvalds, Carmack is one of the few programmers who are recognized in public. Despite his fame and fortune, Carmack seems to regard himself as nothing but a technologist. When the source code to Quake had been stolen off of crack.com's servers, it circulated quickly among the Quake community underground. A young programmer (known as GAlexander on the #c IRC channel) who came upon the source code decided to port Quake to Linux, and sent the patches to Carmack. Instead of having the programmer arrested, id Software (at Carmack's behest) used the patches as the foundation for a company-sanctioned Linux port.
On March 22, 2001, Carmack was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed upon those who have made revolutionary and innovative achievements in the video and computer game industry.
Though Carmack is best known for his innovations in 3D graphics, he is also a rocketry enthusiast and the founder of Armadillo Aerospace.
Some of the recipients of Carmack's charitable contributions include his former high school, promoters of open source software, opposers of software patents, aerospace research, and game enthusiasts. In 1997 he gave away one of his Ferraris as a prize in the Quake "Red Annihilation" tournament.
He married Katherine Anna Kang around January 2000. In 2003, he was one of the subjects of the book Masters of Doom, a chronicle of id Software and its founders.
John Carmack is also called by some of his fans as the OpenGL-Pope, John "Godlike" Carmack or John "The magic fingers" Carmack.
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