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John Carmack Left id Software Because He Couldn't Do VR Work There

Posted by Soulskill on from the also-the-constant-TPS-reports dept.

An anonymous reader writes John Carmack left id Software last year, more than 20 years after he founded the company. There was a lot of speculation as to why, and now an interview at USA Today provides an explanation. Carmack had become Chief Technical Officer for Oculus VR a few months prior, and he was excited about bringing virtual reality gaming into the mainstream. Unfortunately, he couldn't get id Software's parent company, Zenimax, onboard. He'd hoped they would 'allow games he worked on to appear on the Oculus Rift headset. Had the deal been consummated, Wolfenstein: The New Order — an upcoming sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, an early id release — could have been part of the Oculus' tech demonstration that earned raves and awards at the recent Consumer Electronic Show.' Carmack said, 'But they couldn't come together on that which made me really sad. It was just unfortunate. 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.'"

9 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Best of luck, John by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If I had to make a list of people in the gaming industry who could make VR gaming a reality, John Carmack would be at the top of the list.

    Good luck, John! We're all rooting for you.

    1. Re:Best of luck, John by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      John Carmack + Gabe Newell + Oculus Rift = HL3

    2. Re: Best of luck, John by Teancum · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My impression of Doom is more that the protagonist (aka "the player") was psychologically impaired and gradually losing touch with reality, while everybody he met and was "out to get him" was in fact people trying to save him or to protect the base from his destruction. As the player meets more exotic creatures, it is more proof he is just losing touch with reality and getting doped up even more from some experimental treatment gone bad.

      At least that is a way to think about it. A sort of disturbing view as you could say the protagonist is actually killing his fellow marines and is the real enemy, but a different way to view the game.

    3. Re: Best of luck, John by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Funny

      Demons come from another plain of existence. A parallel dimension of destruction, evil, and despair. While they are 'alien' to humanity, not so much in the classical sense of other worldly creatures that originate in our universe.

      I think you've confused middle management with lovecraftian horror beasts. It's okay though, the differences are subtle. Middle management consists of risk-averse middle-aged people who wouldn't know a good idea if it fell on their left foot. Lovecraftian horror beasts, on the other hand, are intelligent hunting critters that know their head from their ass.

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  2. Re:Boo fucking hoo by game+kid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not sure about cry...but let it be a(nother) warning to those who'd flip their startup for profit.

    Once you sell the business to a bigger business, it's theirs and theirs alone, no matter their assurances otherwise, and they won't go your way on anything else from then on, except (co)incidentally. (See also jawed.) So finish all your goals there first.

    --
    You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
  3. This was a good thing for gamers. by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Zenimax not wanting their prized programmer to spend a lot of his time working on promotional material for his other business seems reasonable. I don't fault them for it, nor do I fault him for leaving to work on another passion.

    Two things had become constants at id: the lack of interesting games, and the boundary-pushing tech. Lets be honest, the only thing at id that kept it notable was Carmack. And I say that with a crushed, broken heart, as one who's run a TF server, mastered the trick jumps, and played thousands of rounds well after Quake was out of its prime.

    Carmack leaving id for Oculus will free him from the constraints of a big business and allow him to inject some of that coding genius into yet another promising, young, experimental industry. This is exactly where we need him, and where he'll be able to thrive.

    1. Re:This was a good thing for gamers. by hermitdev · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Zenimax doesn't need Carmack. Zenimax probably doesn't want Carmack. Zenimax is about pumping out products. Look at the poor state Fallout 3/New Vegas were released in, as well as Skyrim. These are some of their premier products and the released them so buggy as to be near unplayable (Fallout 3 was the best of the lot, New Vegas on the 360 would routinely hang after 15 minutes). Carmack is too much of a perfectionist to fit into such a culture. He's fine delaying a product for years if it's not ready (at least technically, let's face it, he's not about the content/design/story).

      Both parties, Zenimax and Carmack, are probably inwardly happier for the separation.

      I like Zenimax games, the stories, but they've been lacking quality of engineering. I had hoped that with the acquisition of id that the quality of engineering might have rubbed off, and with Carmack's departure, I'm disheartened about it.

  4. Thing is by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Their tech really didn't push boundaries that much, at least not usefully, in recent years. The measure of pushing forward with game engines isn't coming up with something new that doesn't work all that well on modern tech, it is coming up with new methods to make things look more real with existing tech. To make things work better, faster, etc.

    So sure, the whole iDTech 5 "megatexture" thing sounds cool... But when you see it in practice it is less impressive than procedural techniques from other engines. On top of that, it requires server class hardware to build maps, whereas other engines feature tools that work on regular systems. Same kind of deal with iDTech 4's lighting model. Ya everything comes from a real light source is neat, but lacking radiosity or other kind of global illumination it ended up only working well at being dark and having extremely hard shadows. Other engines gave much more realistic looking lighting, even if the math was technically less correct.

    To me, it seems like they've been too interested in playing around, and not in delivering useful products. Not that playing around isn't fine, but if you are going to make and sell games and game engines, you need to focus on delivering a good product.

    Hence why iDTech 4 and 5 saw next to no licenses but Unreal Engine 3 saw hundreds. It had good tools, a good workflow, and looked damn good.

    It's sad too because clever tricks to make things look better, even if it wasn't the "right" way of doing things is what made iD famous. Doom was a sea of compromise. It didn't actually have a 3d map, just height information, did clever tricks with the limited pallet to get distance fade, used shortcuts to make the math work fast enough on systems with no coprocessor and so on. Net effect was it looked better than people thought you could make a game look on the hardware of the time.

    Now we have things like Rage. iD can crow on all they like about the technology, doesn't change the fact that Frostbite 2 (Battlefield 3) looks WAY better in actual operation and scales better too.

  5. Re:Boo fucking hoo by allcoolnameswheretak · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe the hurdle was not Zenimax, but Occulus. It's obvious to me that Zenimax should profit from such a deal, as VR is clearly the future. But it's not so obvious why Occulus should tie itself to a single publisher when it's them who's got the "killer app".

    And if for some reason the problem was on Zenimax' side...
    If John Carmack tells you to do something, you do it, bitch!