It's science fiction, of course, but a major influence on his thinking all the same. The ideal Carmack has always had in mind is the Holodeck, the immersive simulation device on Star Trek: The Next Generation. "Programmers will move from being engine coders to being technical directors in the Pixar style." "There's a real chance that the next-generation rendering engine will be a stable, mature technology that lasts in more or less its basic form for a long time," he says. Innovators will focus on optimizing existing code, and major revisions will happen less frequently.
When that happens, technical advances in games will proceed at Hollywood's more measured pace - incrementally instead of in great, creative leaps. Before long, Carmack says, game graphics will rival Monsters, Inc. "I would spend time just looking down at a corner inside the game," Carmack recalls, "just walking around, feeling the world is solid, it's really there." Quake III Arena added further refinements, including curved surfaces and colored lighting.įor years, games have been racing to catch up to the visual standards of animated films. Another first-person shooter, it pioneered three-dimensional polygonal characters as well as a more fluid 3-D world that let players see in any direction. With Quake, released in 1996, Carmack went to the next level. It was another step toward graphical immersion, giving players the feeling they had been dropped into the game. Two years later, Doom introduced variable floor and ceiling heights and walls without 90-degree angles. It was the original first-person shooter. Previous games wasted processor power by having the computer draw all the walls within range of a character, whether they're in his field of vision or not Carmack's breakthrough was to instruct the machine to draw only what the player would see from his point of view.
In 1991, coding a game called Hovertank, Carmack faced a challenge no programmer had yet tackled: how to get a computer to quickly render a three-dimensional world from a first-person perspective.
He's a hero among coders for particularly elegant programming that pushes the limits of hardware. And with each new engine, Carmack's achieved a higher level of immersion and realism.
In an essentially visual medium, the graphics engine - the core code that determines how images are displayed on the screen - is the brain of any game. Since then, Carmack has written a new graphics engine for almost every product he's developed. He used the same breakthrough on id's first best-seller, Commander Keen.
In 1990, while working at Softdisk, the Shreveport, Louisiana-based software company where he met his future id partners, the 19-year-old Carmack figured out how to bring side-scrolling to the PC so he could re-create the arcade action of Super Mario Brothers 3. After being thrown into a juvenile home for stealing an Apple II at age 14, he took the opportunity to create Wraith, a sprawling role-playing game that emulated the ambitious Ultima franchise. As level designer Christian Antkow says, "We cannot fuck this up."įrom the day his mother took him for a TRS-80 programming course when he was in the fifth grade, John Carmack dedicated himself to creating compelling computer graphics.