John Carmack Departs id Software

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C'mon, let's be honest, Carmack hasn't been at id for awhile now. This is just some kind of weird confirming-what-everyone-already-knew kinda thing. Thanks to everyone that sent this one in.

"John Carmack, who has become interested in focusing on things other than game development at id, has resigned from the studio," id Software studio director Tim Willits told IGN. "John's work on id Tech 5 and the technology for the current development work at id is complete, and his departure will not affect any current projects. We are fortunate to have a brilliant group of programmers at id who worked with John and will carry on id's tradition of making great games with cutting-edge technology. As colleagues of John for many years, we wish him well."
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Aw, no. Now he can't push out any more underwhelming titles like Rage and Doom 3.
 
After doing so much for the industry, you deserve to do whatever the hell you want that makes you happy.

Godspeed John.
 
id Tech 5 was his curtain call in gaming development...texture pop-in will live forever
 
Good.
His genius is more suited for further Oculus research. I await the fruits of their labor.
 
I was going to say "in b4 all the people saying he hasn't been relevant for years anyways", but I see its already started.

The guy revolutionized gaming and I personally enjoyed many the games he worked on immensely over the years. There's nothing to do here but wish him well and hope he can have a transformational effect on whatever he works on next, as well.
 
Despite launch hiccups with idTech5, the current iteration of the engine is reportedly very capable.
 
Beowulf said:
*facepalm*

You do realize there are 200+ employees at id software.
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Really as one of the founders he's not at all responsible for the games they put out? So his contributions to id = nothing as you said 200+ employees he's doesn't do enough to get any credit for the good or the bad.
 
Hope he enjoys what he does next, I got a lot of hours of enjoyment out of everything IDTech3 and earlier. I still play Quake 3 nearly daily heh. I did some quick math assuming 300 days per year played, 13 year old game (roughly), 70 dollars cdn collector tin - roughly 1.8 cents per day enjoyed!

Years ago I sent him a question that he answered - something to do with network usage on quake 2 servers per player. I sent him another question asking why he didn't go into missile guidance or military technology. Never heard back. Then, Armadillo Aerospace a few years later. I guess that's why I never heard back.
 
Oh Lordy...

If you weren't around in the DOS era, you would never understand how talented and innovative these guys were.

There was no universal layer. You had to write for each graphics chip, mouse, RAM, etc. You had <600k RAM to work with, and had to simulate a quick moving 3D environment with damn little to work with. Single core, 4.7mhz? And Doom ran sweet.
 
Semantics said:
Really as one of the founders he's not at all responsible for the games they put out? So his contributions to id = nothing as you said 200+ employees he's doesn't do enough to get any credit for the good or the bad.
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Yea, you make a good point.
 
From what I have heard Palmer Lucky say about Carmack in interviews, he is pretty much rewriting the whole Oculus SDK. That's freakin' great, because it's dire right now.
 
EODetroit said:
I was going to say "in b4 all the people saying he hasn't been relevant for years anyways", but I see its already started.

The guy revolutionized gaming and I personally enjoyed many the games he worked on immensely over the years. There's nothing to do here but wish him well and hope he can have a transformational effect on whatever he works on next, as well.
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it's the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately mentality...no one remembers M. Night Shyamalan for Sixth Sense or Unbreakable anymore...they only remember his flops...the Quake/Doom days were a lifetime ago...Carmack was and still is a genius and his legacy is secure but he's had his share of disappointments over the last decade
 
Carmack said once he still has one more maybe two more games engines he intends to write.
So maybe some day..
 
without him, PC gaming would never have gotten off the ground. Think of the engines he made and how many games used them. No has made them like them. Quake 1, in its original form still runs flawless on even today's systems without having to mess with shit.

I honestly don't blame him much for the games sucking. He was the tech guy.
 
It was kind of, you know, expected. Good for him. He sold id (and ips) for $100 million or so. id is done for me now. Not a single one of of the of the founders is there anymore. 10x for the Quake series and Doom 3 guys. Kind of sad :(
 
This was the era where both Arcade and Console machines could not hang with PC's.

All had the same chips. The talent was on the Fun Side instead of the Money Side.
 
People like to crap on RAGE, but the gunplay in that game is next to none. It has very carefully figured out timings and sounds, and the engine really shines on a modern machine. Even the first gun you get in this game is just FUN to shoot.
 
Bigbacon said:
without him, PC gaming would never have gotten off the ground. Think of the engines he made and how many games used them. No has made them like them. Quake 1, in its original form still runs flawless on even today's systems without having to mess with shit.

I honestly don't blame him much for the games sucking. He was the tech guy.
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I think this is a ridiculous comment. Maybe things would have been delayed by a year or 2 but PC gaming and 3D FPS is just to simple and sought after as a concept. Sorry but it would have come sooner or later and given that consoles were too closed / wrong it would have come to PCs.
 
rudy said:
I think this is a ridiculous comment. Maybe things would have been delayed by a year or 2 but PC gaming and 3D FPS is just to simple and sought after as a concept. Sorry but it would have come sooner or later and given that consoles were too closed / wrong it would have come to PCs.
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You have no clue how big the jump was.

It went from 2D Top View, Dungeons and Dragons, to 3D FPS in less than a month.

No change in the hardware.

Certainly it WOULD have happened. But there was no money in it. IIRC, most the games were free, or low cost, or not copy protected.

Believe it or not, all First Person Shooters are basically the same since Doom. They only got prettier. So a 80286-6 single core and a 128k video card could do what a machine over 4,000 times faster could do.

Think on that.

A first person shooter on a PC, could run solid at 0.006 ghz with 0.005 GB of RAM, and had single core graphics with 0.001 gb of RAM.

Much like the Apollo moon landing, I'm not sure it could be done today.

Now to REALLY fuck with you, the Sinclair 1000 had a 3D flight simulator that ran on 8,192 bytes of memory. Both program and storage. It cost $99.
 
Bigbacon said:
without him, PC gaming would never have gotten off the ground.
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Without him, we'd be bidding farewell to Ken Silverman, instead. It's one thing to admire the guy but you're overselling his impact.
 
I'm building a Dinosaur machine right now, since it needs to run DOS at low speed.

I found a copy of Warcraft on one of the old IDE 10gb drives.

At 0.500 ghz single core, with 0.128 gb of RAM and 0.016 gb of video, it is too fucking fast to play.

Are there hackers today that could do that? I'm not sure.
 
Qinsp said:
I'm building a Dinosaur machine right now, since it needs to run DOS at low speed.

I found a copy of Warcraft on one of the old IDE 10gb drives.
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'Old' IDE 10 gig? I better start throwing stuff away, I still have some 250 meg drives laying around for... I think I was going to use the platters to make something, or re-use the magnets but... there they sit.

Anyway.. Carmack is awesome. I'm sure he isn't done with game engines though. I always loved that when he programmed he said that if it didn't run in Win NT, he wouldn't code it. (Especially since I only ran NT for many years) That's probably why all those older games still work flawlessly.
 
Regardless, he's still that person that people would pay attention to what he's up to and be interested to see what he can achieve.

So the question now is where is he going to, and what will he be doing there?
 
Betaboy1983 said:
'Old' IDE 10 gig? I better start throwing stuff away, I still have some 250 meg drives laying around for... I think I was going to use the platters to make something, or re-use the magnets but... there they sit.

Anyway.. Carmack is awesome. I'm sure he isn't done with game engines though. I always loved that when he programmed he said that if it didn't run in Win NT, he wouldn't code it. (Especially since I only ran NT for many years) That's probably why all those older games still work flawlessly.
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My first HDD was 20mb. The removable platter was 10, and the fixed was 10. It took 5 minutes to stablize before the green light came on, and it was the size of a suitcase, 10" dia platters. $10k in 1982, made by Pertec.
 
John Carmack simply wrote the game engines and id and other game designers bought his engines he wrote to make games. He was and still is a brilliant game engine designer and has no control if a game comes out badly.
 
Here's the issue.

I grew up stunned at what these guys could do. Bill Gates, Woz, Romero, Carmack, Peter Norton, etc, etc.

Don't mean to insult anyone, there were dozens of hotshoes that were writing very tight code to do incredible things with very limited resources.

At the time, I was writing 3D CAD code. Everything had to fit at first in 65535 bytes, then 640k bytes.

Today, we have virtually limitless amount of RAM, and truly stupid amounts of processor power.

We no longer can do the One Man Show. You can't write 16,000,000,000 bytes of tight code for 4,000 processors.

We need the Next Killer App. A task that will make 16gb of RAM and 4000 processor cores seem ridiculously small. And we need our next Hackers to figure out how to make that 16gb act like 10,000 GB and our 4000 processors to act like 100,000 cores.

What kind of app will that be? I don't know. But there are young men and women who will find that Killer App and make the Big Jump.

But don't discount the trailblazers. They did what people thought was impossible with the resources available. We need their spawn to drive the next big jump...
 
I'm trying to remember what the 8086 chip default was. You'd have to turn the Turbo button off to start Doom IIRC.
 
Remember Turbo button? The 386/486 machines had to have them to slow them down.
 
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