John Carmack
id Software co-founder who created the first-person shooter genre and the game engine industry with code
John Carmack co-founded id Software and was the technical architect behind Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, and other groundbreaking games. He invented or popularized numerous still-influential 3D graphics techniques, including BSP tree rendering, lightmaps, flat shading, and the fast inverse square root algorithm. Recognized for his ability to derive everything from first principles, he joined Oculus as CTO in 2012, driving VR technology development. In 2022 he left Meta to focus full-time on AI, founding AGI company Keen Technologies.
Methodologies
- First-Principles Performance Architecture - Design systems from physical constraints and mathematical principles rather than from existing frameworks — only this way can you break through 'industry ceilings.'
- Constraint Examination Breakthrough Method - Before accepting 'this can't be done,' first examine whether the 'impossibility' comes from physical law or an unvalidated industry assumption.
Key decisions and timeline
- 1991 Co-Founded id Software with John Romero and Others - Technical breakthroughs often occur when founders believe that 'what others think is impossible can be solved with clever engineering.'
- 1992 Released Wolfenstein 3D, Creating the FPS Game Genre - The goal of visual effects is to make players feel the experience is real, not physically accurate; engineering elegance often comes from accepting constraints rather than fighting them.
- 1993 Released Doom, Redefining Game Engine Licensing Business Model - Platformizing and licensing a technical foundation builds longer-term industry influence than simply selling content.
Beliefs and mental models
- Belief 1 - Carmack believes that with deep enough understanding of foundational physics, mathematics, and algorithms, one can independently derive optimal solutions in any domain without relying on existing authorities or tools.
- Belief 2 - Performance problems should be solved at the system design stage, not patched later; every render frame, every millisecond of latency has physical meaning and should be precisely controlled.
- Belief 3 - In the id Software era, Carmack pioneered the tradition of open-sourcing code (Quake 1 engine source code open-sourced in 1999), believing that open knowledge dissemination accelerates progress across entire fields.
- Model 1
- Model 2
- Model 3