Carmack is a clever programmer and successful engineer. That’s underselling it, he’s been called the best programmer of a generation.
I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know while he created impressive software everybody I’ve talked to who has worked for or near him says he’s an insufferable perfectionist who grinds people around him.
The bones of some of his lighting algorithms are still in use to this day. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that he is an exceptional programmer.
The best of his generation is harder to assert just because that generation had a pretty large handful of names who each truly revolutionized computing. But I do believe that without Carmack then Doom never happens, idtech never happens, the resulting 90’s-2000’s FPS craze never happens. Without Doom landing on the hardware of every nerd on the planet it’s very likely the middle age of the video game industry went in a very different direction.
I’d say he earned that ego, even if I wouldn’t like dealing with it in a professional environment. But I think it’s a reasonable thing to say that a good 75% of the next decade of game dev was primarily borne up by Carmack’s bootstraps.
Carmack is a clever programmer and successful engineer. That’s underselling it, he’s been called the best programmer of a generation.
I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know while he created impressive software everybody I’ve talked to who has worked for or near him says he’s an insufferable perfectionist who grinds people around him.
The bones of some of his lighting algorithms are still in use to this day. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that he is an exceptional programmer.
The best of his generation is harder to assert just because that generation had a pretty large handful of names who each truly revolutionized computing. But I do believe that without Carmack then Doom never happens, idtech never happens, the resulting 90’s-2000’s FPS craze never happens. Without Doom landing on the hardware of every nerd on the planet it’s very likely the middle age of the video game industry went in a very different direction.
I’d say he earned that ego, even if I wouldn’t like dealing with it in a professional environment. But I think it’s a reasonable thing to say that a good 75% of the next decade of game dev was primarily borne up by Carmack’s bootstraps.
Oh yeah, earned for sure. And absolutely an exceptional programmer. No question.