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Today is the birthday John D. Carmack II, also known more casually as John Carmack. He was born in 1970, and turns 39 today.
John Carmack is one of the four original co-founders of the legendary id software, and the only remaining one of those co-founders still with the company (John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall have since left). id Software, which was independent for many years, was bought by ZeniMax Media this year. id is responsible for many well known game franchises such as Commander Keen (actually Softdisk), Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake.
John is also responsible for many innovations in graphics, with id’s games, particularly the Doom and Quake series but also Rage (currently in development at time of writing), having showcased the latest developments in game graphics. Doom showed off the id Tech 1 engine, Quake II the id Tech 2, Quake III Arena the id Tech 3, Doom 3 the id Tech 4, and Rage the id Tech 5 engine, which will also be used by future games like Doom 4.
These engines mentioned have been used by many other games like Hexen, Hexen II, Call of Duty, Half-Life, Soldier of Fortune 1& 2, and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.
Interesting facts:
- John is a rocketry enthusiast and is the founder and lead engineer of Armadillo Aerospace, founded in 2000.
- John has a love for Ferraris, and even gave one of his away in a competition years ago.
- John was once arrested for breaking into a school and attempting to steal Apple II computers.
- John Carmack is a supporter of copyleft, or open source projects.
- John Carmack is an atheist.
- John Carmack is supposedly the one who coined the phrase, “when it’s done”, which was subsequently used and abused by Apogee, which initially published some of id’s early games like Wolfenstein 3D, and is now known as 3D Realms, particularly with Duke Nukem Forever. This is because of his tendency to avoid set release dates, which inevitably change over the course of games’ development schedules.
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