John Carmack

Early life

Carmack was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, the son of local television news reporter Stan Carmack. He grew up in the Kansas City metropolitan area, where he became interested in computers at an early age. He attended Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas and Raytown South High School in nearby Raytown, Missouri.

Carmack was introduced to video games with the 1978 shoot 'em up game Space Invaders in the arcades during a summer vacation as a child. The 1980 maze chase arcade game Pac-Man also left a strong impression on him. He cited Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto as the game developer he most admired.

As reported in David Kushner's Masters of Doom, when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school with other children to steal Apple II computers. To gain entry to the building, Carmack concocted a sticky substance of thermite mixed with Vaseline that melted through the windows. However, an overweight accomplice struggled to get through the hole and instead opened the window, setting off a silent alarm and alerting police. Carmack was arrested and sent for psychiatric evaluation. He was sentenced to a year in a juvenile home. He attended the University of Missouri–Kansas City for two semesters before withdrawing to work as a freelance programmer.

Softdisk, a computer company in Shreveport, Louisiana, hired Carmack to work on Softdisk G-S (an Apple IIGS publication), introducing him to John Romero and other future key members of id Software such as Adrian Carmack (no relation). Later, Softdisk would place this team in charge of a new, but short-lived, bi-monthly game subscription product called Gamer's Edge for the IBM PC (DOS) platform. In 1990, while still at Softdisk, Carmack, Romero, and others created the first of the Commander Keen games, a series that was published by Apogee Software, under the shareware distribution model, from 1991 onwards. Afterwards, Carmack left Softdisk to co-found id Software.

Carmack has pioneered or popularized the use of many techniques in computer graphics, including "adaptive tile refresh" for Commander Keen, ray casting for Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3-D, and Wolfenstein 3D, binary space partitioning which Doom became the first game to use, surface caching which he invented for Quake, Carmack's Reverse (formally known as z-fail stencil shadows) which he devised for Doom 3, and MegaTexture technology, first used in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Quake 3 popularized the fast inverse square root algorithm.

Carmack's engines have also been licensed for use in other influential first-person shooters such as Half-Life, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. In 2005, Carmack developed his first game for mobile phones, Doom RPG.

On August 7, 2013, Carmack joined Oculus VR as their CTO. On November 22, 2013, he resigned from id Software to work full-time at Oculus VR. Carmack's reason for leaving was that id's parent company ZeniMax Media did not want to support Oculus Rift. Carmack's role at both companies later became central to a ZeniMax lawsuit against Oculus' parent company, Meta (then known as Facebook), claiming that Oculus stole ZeniMax's virtual reality intellectual property. The trial jury absolved Carmack of liability, though Oculus and other corporate officers were held liable for trademark, copyright, and contract violations.

In February 2017, Carmack sued ZeniMax, claiming the company had refused to pay him the remaining $22.5 million (~$28.2 million in 2024) owed to him from their purchase of id Software. In October 2018, Carmack stated that he and ZeniMax had reached an agreement and that "Zenimax has fully satisfied their obligations to me", ending the suit.

On November 13, 2019, Carmack stepped down from the Oculus CTO role to become a "Consulting CTO" in order to allocate more time to his work on artificial general intelligence (AGI). On August 19, 2022, Carmack announced that he has raised $20M for Keen Technologies, his new AGI company. On December 16, 2022, Carmack left Oculus to focus on Keen.

In September 2023 John partnered with reinforcement learning researcher Richard S. Sutton, though Sutton left in 2026 to launch the AI startup Oak Lab.

Carmack was so successful at id that by mid-1994 he had purchased two Ferraris: a Ferrari 328 and a Ferrari Testarossa. In 1997, he gave away the Ferrari 328 as a prize to Dennis Fong, the winner of the Quake tournament "Red Annihilation".

He met his now ex-wife Katherine Anna Kang at the 1997 QuakeCon when she visited id's offices. As a bet, Kang challenged Carmack to sponsor the first all-female Quake tournament if she was able to produce a significant number of participants. Carmack predicted a maximum of 25 participants, but there were 1,500. Carmack and Kang married on January 1, 2000, and planned a ceremony in Hawaii. Steve Jobs requested that they would postpone the ceremony so Carmack could attend the MacWorld Expo on January 5, 2000. Carmack declined and suggested making a video instead. Carmack and Kang had a son Christopher Ryan in August 2004. Their second son was born in November 2009.

Carmack is divorced as of 2021. On May 26, 2022, he announced his divorce and how he met his partner Trista through the VR Beat Saber games he would host via Twitter.

As a game developer, Carmack differed from many of his contemporaries by avoiding commitment to a final release date for any game he was developing. Instead, when asked for a release date on a new game, Carmack would usually reply that the game would be released "when it's done". Employees at Apogee, in their past years the publishers of games by id Software, adopted this business practice as well. In 2019, as a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, Carmack stated that his beliefs have changed over time: "I largely recant from that now." On Rage's six-year development time he says: "I think we should have done whatever it would have taken to ship that two years earlier." Carmack also reflected on the internal development of Quake in this regard and described it as "traumatic" and says id Software could have split the game into two parts and shipped it earlier.

Carmack has a blog last updated in 2006 (previously a.plan on id Software's server, under the username johnc), an active Twitter account, and also occasionally posts comments to Slashdot.

Carmack supported the 2012 presidential campaign of Libertarian Ron Paul, and also persuaded the Libertarian Party of Texas to accept bitcoin as an alternative to donations. He is an atheist. During a conversation with Joe Rogan, Carmack revealed that he had trained in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Judo for several years as a hobby.

During his time at id Software, a medium pepperoni pizza would arrive for Carmack from Domino's Pizza almost every day, carried by the same delivery person for more than 15 years. Carmack had been such a regular customer that they continued to charge him 1995 prices.

On occasion he has commended the efforts of similarly focused programmers – first Ken Silverman, who wrote the Build engine for 3D Realms, and later with Tim Sweeney of Epic Games, who wrote the Unreal Engine.