When the source code to Quake was leaked and circulated among the Quake community underground in 1996, a programmer unaffiliated with id Software used it to port Quake to Linux, and subsequently sent the patches to Carmack.
He has also contributed to open-source projects, such as starting the initial port of the X Window System to Mac OS X Server and working to improve the OpenGL drivers for Linux through the Utah GLX project.Ĭarmack released the source code for Wolfenstein 3D in 1995 and the Doom source code in 1997. Open-source software Ĭarmack is a well-known advocate of open-source software, and has repeatedly voiced his opposition to software patents, equating them to robbery. The company went into "hibernation mode" in 2013. In September 2009, they completed Level 2 and were awarded $500,000. In October 2008, Armadillo Aerospace competed in a NASA contest known as the Lunar Lander Challenge, winning first place in the Level 1 competition along with $350,000. Carmack funded the company, called Armadillo Aerospace, out of his own pocket, for "something north of a million dollars a year." The company of hobbyists made steady progress toward their goals of suborbital space flight and eventual orbital vehicles. Reviewing how much money he was spending on customizing Ferraris, He began by giving financial support to a few local amateur engineers. Ĭarmack during the 2005 X PRIZE Cup in Las Cruces and Alamogordo, New MexicoĪround 2000, Carmack became interested in rocketry, a hobby of his youth. In 2007, when Carmack was on vacation with his wife, he ended up playing some games on his cellphone, and decided he was going to make a "good" mobile game. Ĭarmack'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. Quake 3 popularized the fast inverse square root algorithm. Ĭarmack 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.
Afterwards, Carmack left Softdisk to co-found id Software.
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.
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. Softdisk, a computer company in Shreveport, Louisiana, hired Carmack to work on Softdisk G-S (an Apple II GS publication), introducing him to John Romero and other future key members of id Software such as Adrian Carmack (not related). He attended the University of Missouri–Kansas City for two semesters before withdrawing to work as a freelance programmer. He was sentenced to a year in a juvenile home. Carmack was arrested and sent for psychiatric evaluation. However, an overweight accomplice struggled to get through the hole and instead opened the window, setting off a silent alarm and alerting police. To gain entry to the building, Carmack concocted a sticky substance of thermite mixed with Vaseline that melted through the windows. Īs reported in David Kushner's Masters of Doom, when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school to help a group of children steal Apple II computers. He cited Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto as the game developer he most admired. The 1980 maze chase arcade game Pac-Man also left a strong impression on him. He attended Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas and Raytown South High School in nearby Raytown, Missouri.Ĭarmack was introduced to video games with the 1978 shoot 'em up game Space Invaders in the arcades during a summer vacation as a child.
He grew up in the Kansas City metropolitan area, where he became interested in computers at an early age. Carmack was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, the son of local television news reporter Stan Carmack.