id Software's Loss Was Oculus VR's Gain: Why Carmack Left
John Carmack talks about Oculus Rift, leaving id Software.
The Oculus Rift is going to change the world. How do we know? You can smell it in the air; you can feel it in your bones. We felt the same thing when we first saw Wolfenstein, when we first saw Quake running on a GPU, when mobile phones suddenly became game machines with multiple cores. That feeling has returned thanks to Oculus VR.
Id Software co-founder John Carmack must have felt the same thing when he first checked out Palmer Luckey's Rift prototype. Now he's the Chief Technical Officer of Oculus VR as of August 2013, working out of his Dallas office while the main team resides in Irvine, California.
Between August and November 2013, Carmack, 43, tried to do both jobs. He told USA Today that he wanted Oculus VR and ZeniMax Media (id Software's parent company) to agree to adding support for Oculus Rift in games that he worked on.
Had the deal been signed and sealed, Wolfenstein: The New Order would have been part of Oculus' tech demonstration during CES 2014. Doom 4 would have been part of the agreement as well.
Even more, had the deal gone through, Carmack could have stayed with id Software and continued to work both jobs. "I would have been content probably staying there working with the people and technology that I know and the work we were doing," he told USA Today.
"But they couldn't come together on that which made me really sad. It was just unfortunate," Carmack said. "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."
He left id Software in November 2013.
While there's a lot of attention on the way Oculus Rift will change gaming, eventually the HMD will change the way many people live their lives, their jobs. The Oculus Rift could be used in word processing, email writing, and according to USA Today, possibly providing Minority Report-like functions.
"It could become something that is potentially usable by almost anybody that carries a mobile device," Carmack told the paper.
Palmer Luckey, Co-founder of Oculus VR and the inventor of the Oculus Rift, said that Carmack's early experiments with the Rift put Oculus on the map and helped create a huge amount of momentum around virtual reality.
Er, no. I don't think so.
"... used in word processing, email writing, ..."
found a profitable niche in industrial use where it can make a real
and useful difference, but bringing VR to the consumer market
presents a whole host of problems, especially medical issues.
Nintendo has danced around this area several times but always
backed away on health grounds.
Even with motion tracking, VR is no panacea of UI design. There's
obviously scope for its use in gaming, but we've been down this
road before. Even if the device provides a high quality display with
precision tracking, end pricing then becomes key, and I can't see
it being affordable enough to really open up the market, not yet.
But even if it does come to market and doesn't cost a fortune, VR
is not going to become the new way to do word processing or
email, that's just daft. I can only surmise those who say this sort
of thing have never actually used a motion tracked VR setup.
Ian.
Lauding up Carmack at id Software in this way is a bit of a misnomer IMO. The other people there
were just as important to the creation of the earlier games, eg. a lot of the coding of Doom was
done by Dave Taylor. Then there's John Romero, American McGee, Shawn Green, Jay Wilbur, etc.
Each performing vital functions in the formation of id's games. I can't really square the over-the-top
Carmack-worship we see today with the *combined* effort of all the company's staff I saw on
display when I visited them in 1995. Carmack didn't create Doom, Quake, etc. on his own; they all
did, and from what I saw in 1995, Dave Taylor may have been just as important wrt the coding of
the original Doom (maybe more, who can say?). See:
http://www.gamers.org/dhs/usavisit/dallas.html
Ironically, Carmack isn't the most sociable of people (or at least he wasn't back then) - he was the
one person I didn't get to meet. So who knows, the nature of personal relationships between
Carmack and those at ZeniMax (maybe the current staff at id aswell) might have been another factor
in his decision to leave id, but I doubt anyone at either company would talk about that sort of thing.
Was Carmack critical to the creation of Doom, etc.? You betcha! Could they have ever come out
without all the combined effort of many other people aswell? No. These games were complicated
to develop; it took a team effort to get the work done, not just one man.
Ian.