Carmack Retiring?
I don’t want to be the source of any rumors, but I’m afraid John Carmack will retire soon.
I have been a Doom afficionado since 1994 (yeah, I was a little bit late). I played every official idsoftware game after that. Doom II. Quake 1-3. (Let me add here that all the quake stuff was not half as amusing as the original doom it its time).
The engines Carmack wrote were always superior to any other piece of gaming engine in the world. Sometimes other developers followed after 6 months, sometimes it was more a year, to produce something similar of quality. But this guy always set the standard, and it was nearly always ground-breaking.
When I started my professional career 1996 as C developer Carmack was my god. I fingered him everyday. Only when he hadn’t said anything new I would finger other emplyees out of boredom. Sometimes even the designers. LOL.
I admit that sometimes his plan was too revealing, I still remeber when he announced Quake 3 and that it would be purely multiplayer. Of course the Unreal guys had the exact same idea months before …
But John has been silent for a very long time. No plan since Feb 7, 2003. This is startling. Then all the talk about his space ambitions.
If John Carmack leaves this industry, who will set the standards? Not that most developers recognized the standard. In too many cases they re-develop a very mediocre engine, instead of licensing the newest from idsoftware. Quite a few excellent games (from the gameplay point of view) had lousy graphics. System Shock 2 comes to my mind. I was playing this for weeks. If only the monsters had looked more real.
Why does every little publisher spend most of their energy in inventing the wheel again? Hey, I even know a lot of real guys who still have the dream to develop the next engine. They could be really innovative by inventing some cool gameplay for a sophisticated existing engine. But no, they want to be a god like John. Half-Life comes to my mind. Refreshing game, but the engine … They shouldn’t have tweaked the Quake 2 engine that much.
But maybe idsoftware has just the best artists and that’s the reason for a lot of 3d games monsters to walk to awkward.
Whatever, if John leaves we will have to wait some years for some real innovation until the next genius is born.
In order to honor him I decided to take all his plan files and interweave them into this blog. So if you see John Carmack posting, it’s from his plan file.