Zandronum

John Carmack Joins Oculus as CTO

We have incredible news to share with the community: legendary game programmer John Carmack will be officially joining the Oculus team as our new Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

John is one of the brightest minds of our generation -- pioneer, visionary, and industry legend. There are very few people in the world that can contribute to the Oculus Rift and the future of virtual reality like John can.

John put together a short note for the Oculus community:

“I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It’s certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be awesome!”

If you’re unfamiliar with John’s background, John co-founded id Software, served as lead programmer on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and the Quake series, and is one of the pioneers of 3D graphics. When John’s not working on revolutionizing video games or computer graphics, he can be found coding at Armadillo Aerospace.

If you’ve been following Oculus since the launch of the Kickstarter campaign (or before that on MTBS3D), you know that John has been a part of the project and a true believer in the future of virtual reality since the beginning. He was the first developer to actually integrate the Rift into a game, back when the hardware was just a hand-held prototype without an SDK.

QuakeCon 2012 Panel - Virtual Insanity
Watch the Video

Palmer, Michael Abrash (Valve), and John discuss virtual reality at QuakeCon 2012.

John will be working from the new Oculus Dallas office that we’re opening soon. We’re looking for a few key hires to help us in Dallas, so if you’re interested, check out the Oculus Careers page.

Please join us in welcoming John to the Oculus family! You can follow John at @ID_AA_Carmack on Twitter.

Happy anniversary to our Kickstarter backers! We've come a long a way in 1 year, and we can't wait to show you where we're headed next. This is just the beginning.

-- Palmer, John and the Oculus team

darkstar64 wrote: At this point it seems that John Carmack is more of a technology and software guy rather than a video game programmer

Samurai wrote: Wonder where that leaves Doom 4, providing it ever gets released...

jwaffe wrote: Strange to think they're all gone now, with the Doom ip owned by Bethesda. I guess it's possible that Bethesda will do something "risky" and hire somebody to make doom 4 more like 1 and 2... bringing back the mappers from NRFTL and having them make something high res would be interesting.

Hellstorm Archon wrote: Just found some not-so-good-news:

It turns out that Carmack is an Ayn Randriod Libertarian, which may had something to do with him leaving (or ZeniMax owning id in the first place).

And yes, it was too soon that I said he was one of the few gaming geniuses with an untarnished record.

Let's see how the rest of the Doom community (and gaming industry) will take it.