John Carmack

John D. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970, 53 years old) was the lead programmer at id Software and one of the company's co-founders. He created the Doom engine and the engines for all other id releases until leaving the company in late 2013. He is currently Chief Technology Officer at.

Biography
John Carmack grew up in, part of the Kansas City metropolitan area, and became interested in computers at an early age. He graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School, then attended for two semesters before dropping out to work as a freelance programmer.

software company hired Carmack after a series of successful contract assignments, uniting him with John Romero and other future members of id Software. In 1990, Carmack, Romero, and others created the first of the Commander Keen series, which would be published as shareware by from 1991 onwards. Afterwards most of that team left Softdisk to form id Software; in particular, Carmack had created a breakthrough of smooth 2D scrolling under, but both Softdisk and  declined further development.

Carmack's most recognized accomplishments are in programming games. He was the main developer of several seminal titles including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, as well as their newer followups (including Doom 3 and the rest of the ). He has invented several graphical rendering algorithms, notably surface caching and. Carmack's engines have been licensed for use in other influential action games such as Hexen, ', and '.

Carmack works to promote philosophy and fan feedback in his game designs. When the source code to Quake was stolen and circulated among the Quake community underground, a programmer unaffiliated with id Software used it to port Quake to Linux, and subsequently sent the patches to Carmack. Instead of pursuing legal action, at Carmack's behest id Software used the patches as the foundation for a company-sanctioned Linux port. In 2009, Carmack posted to the Doomworld forums to solicit players' input on the mechanics of the upcoming Doom Classic.

Carmack is also noted for his generosity to charities and gaming communities. Some of the recipients of his charitable contributions include his former high school, promoters of open source software, opponents of software patents, aerospace research, and game enthusiasts. In 1997 he gave away one of his as a prize to the winner of the Quake "Red Annihilation" tournament,.

On March 22, 2001, Carmack was inducted into the ' Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed upon those who have made revolutionary and innovative achievements in the video and computer game industry.

Though Carmack is best known for his innovations in 3D graphics, he is also a enthusiast and the founder of.

Carmack met Katherine Anna Kang after she visited him at the id offices with a friend during. They married around January 2000 and have a son, Christopher.