Carmack officially leaves iD

    I guess id is now... doomed.


    Honestly though I couldn't be more excited that he decided to join Occulus. I freaking love John Carmack and I've been super optimistic about what Oculus has been doing, so this just makes it all the better. Good for him, and I wish id the best.

    good to see some high profile people behind the rift, I'm definitely more excited he's behind this than another graphics engine, we have enough of those already.


    who knows, maybe in 5 years or so the rift and similar tech will be worth it

    Yup. Pretty happy about that! You can argue that it's the end of an era, but I think it was long overdue. He's a visionary and he's probably better off building the future of gaming

    I for one am totally looking forward to what he'll bring to Virtual Reality!

    Excellent news. I'm very glad he'll be innovating at Occulus once more. Because let's face it, Id was holding him back. Now is als the right time for Zenimax to do something about Id itself and start bringing us some proper titles based on Id's franchises.

    In my eyes id "died" as soon as John Romero, Sandy Petersen and American McGee (who's probably my favorite level designer) left. Now I'm not saying id's games after Quake were bad (except maybe Quake 2), but they did not have the impact of their earlier titles even though they had great engines. I'm confident Carmack will do wonderful things at Oculus now. I think he should have done that years ago.

    Yeah, I've not really seen id as being particularly relevant for a long, long time. Sure they had huge impact with Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake — and the pre-2000 engines of those games were a huge thing for the industry and still sit behind the technology of many of today's games. But apart from those successes, what has id really accomplished?


    I can't think of anything they've done for about 13 years that's really had much of an effect on the community or industry. Doom 3 didn't do much for me even if it was a decent game, and Rage failed to draw me in beyond its technology too. The engines of those games haven't taken off either.


    Carmack has definitely been wasted there. Game engines are too mature to be that interesting for him to work on, you can't have the same mindblowing steps forward that were accomplished in the early days. He's a pioneer and inventor, he should be building something like Oculus Rift which has the potential to transform gaming experiences if key technological issues can be overcome — something he specialises in. Not endlessly iterating graphical steps forward until the day he dies.


    I hope he uses the rest of his life to bring as many of the incredible steps forward he did in his earlier days. I suspect he had some trouble letting go of id, but now he's done it he's a free man.

    Quote from Skacky

    In my eyes id "died" as soon as John Romero, Sandy Petersen and American McGee (who's probably my favorite level designer) left. Now I'm not saying id's games after Quake were bad (except maybe Quake 2), but they did not have the impact of their earlier titles even though they had great engines. I'm confident Carmack will do wonderful things at Oculus now. I think he should have done that years ago.


    I'm with you on that

    This is a pretty interesting article in which Carmack talks about him leaving iD. In short, he wanted to make iD titles compatible with Oculus but Zenimax wouldn't have it and that's why he left. He strongly believes in the future of VR.


    Quote

    "But they couldn't come together on that which made me really sad. It was just unfortunate," Carmack says. "When it became clear that I wasn't going to have the opportunity to do any work on VR while at id software, I decided to not renew my contract.

    I finally had the chance to try Oculus Rift two days ago and got very, very impressed with it. I tested the classics rollercoaster, which had a great sense of depth, but wasn't as exciting as a real one (maybe I watched too many reaction videos and it affected mine); Tuscany, which was beautiful but gave me motion sickness after a while; and a Universe exploration, which was the best one that I tried, as it showed the solar system in real scale. Fucking amazing! We are so insignificant. Ridiculous


    Now, when I remember that at the moment the Great God is part of the team behind Oculus, I have no option but to wet my pants in excitement for what is to come in the near future.

    Hail Carmack!

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