John Carmack
American computer programmer and video game developer · United States · On the map · Developers · Born 1970 · age 56
He wrote the engine that taught a generation of PCs how to render 3D space in real time - then walked away from games entirely to chase virtual reality and, later, artificial general intelligence.
John Carmack is read about 780 times a day, in 39 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 9 November 2026
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, I’m going to turn on every damn light in protest of Earth Hour. Lighting the darkness is fundamental to humanity's climb.
But realistically, we don’t have that many problems at QuakeCon. If it was a football convention or something, there would probably be a lot more incidents.
The Xbox 360 is the first console that I've ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we've had on PC.
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About this person
John D. Carmack II was born August 21, 1970. He co-founded id Software and served as lead programmer on Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake through the 1990s, titles that defined early first-person gaming. His work included technical breakthroughs in 3D graphics, among them Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes. In 2013 he resigned from id to join Oculus VR as CTO. By 2019 he had stepped back to Consulting CTO to devote time to artificial general intelligence. In 2022 he left Oculus altogether and founded Keen Technologies, an AGI startup, trading the virtual worlds he built for the attempt to build minds that think.
