John Carmack Leaves id Software

jones_supa writes "John Carmack has left id Software completely. 'John Carmack, who has become interested in focusing on things other than game development at id, has resigned from the studio,' id's studio director Tim Willits told IGN, and continues: 'John's work on id Tech 5 and the technology for the current development work at id is complete, and his departure will not affect any current projects. We are fortunate to have a brilliant group of programmers at id who worked with John and will carry on id's tradition of making great games with cutting-edge technology. As colleagues of John for many years, we wish him well.' Carmack, a co-founder of id, recently joined Oculus VR as Chief Technology Officer, and at the time remained at id Software in some capacity. Earlier this year, id president Todd Hollenshead departed id as well."

Comments

Re:The end of an era.

[SethJohnson]

Wouldn't shock me to see him do a new start up company in the mobile games space and re-invest himself in Armadillo Aerospace again.

Armadillo Aerospace lost the race for the SpaceX prize. It didn't develop any compelling intellectual property that set it much apart from the other commercial offerings in space travel, so it's become an also-ran. There are no plans for it to do much of anything unless another tycoon comes along and injects vast sums of cash. Carmack is done floating it with his own personal wealth.

His new passion is Oculus Rift. He brings great momentum to that project.

His presence at iD and Oculus probably became strained due to Oculus wanting to be platform & engine independent, while iD would obviously want priority compatibility built into Oculus for their engine.

Re:The end of an era.

[Hadlock]

Armadillo was a profitable company (as in, showed a profit at the end of a fiscal year) with several different research contracts for NASA before it imploded due to mismanagement. I'm not sure what your ambiguous comment about "SpaceX Prize" means, do you mean the Lunar X prize? Armadillo never made a bid for the commercial crew program as far as I'm aware (where SpaceX is competing with two other, non-Armadillo affiliated companies).