Word: carmack
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...janitor who showed John Carmack that the world had changed. In 1993 Carmack was working on a new kind of video game for a tiny company called id Software. He had written games before, but nobody except computer geeks had cared much about them. "I remember showing some people games that I liked on the Apple II," Carmack remembers, "and just having them sit there, completely not comprehending what could be enjoyable about moving these little guys around. People just did not get it." But this game was different. "We noticed that the janitor coming in to empty the trash...
...game was called Doom, and the janitor was among the first of us normal people to get a look at the electronic frontier of the coming century. With Doom, Carmack and his colleagues had created a three-dimensional virtual world so powerful, compelling and disturbing that it would change the real world around it. This week id will launch Doom 3, four years in the making. It is, if anything, a little too real...
...consisted of six rootless dorks in an office in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Carmack, their programming ringer, was a 23-year-old who had spent a year in juvie and completed exactly two semesters at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Carmack is an odd duck: blond, skinny, with a fixed, unblinking gaze and a curious vocal tic--his sentences often end with an involuntary noise that sounds something like Mn! Despite his otherworldly demeanor, he is artlessly charming, although he does not make anything resembling small talk. It's not because he's too busy...
Before Doom most games took place in flatland: they were two-dimensional, like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man. But Carmack figured out a way for the cheapo, underpowered personal computers of the day to create depth, to render three-dimensional spacea miniature theater, a virtual dreamworld in which the player could move around at will. "You could have fun with those old games, but it was more of a detached, abstract sort of fun," Carmack says. "But when you take the exact same game play, put it in the first-person perspective, and you go around a corner, open...
Doom was packed with high-tech innovations. It pioneered multiplayer gaming over networks, online distribution and an open architecture that promoted user modifications. Today video games are a $7 billion industry, and most of them rip off Carmack's work in one form or another. The military used multiplayer Doom to train soldiers for combat. Architects use the graphics engine for Quake, Doom's successor, to explore their buildings before they build them. Doom and Quake have pushed computer manufacturers to make (and gamers to buy) faster, more powerful machines...