Oculus CTO John Carmack Is Suing ZeniMax For $22.5 Million (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The feud between Oculus and ZeniMax Media is opening up once again, this time with the CTO of Oculus, John Carmack, suing his former employer for earnings that he claims are still owed to him. The suit is largely unrelated to the $6 billion trade secrets suit which ended last month with a $500 million judgment against Oculus. Instead, Carmack is suing ZeniMax Media for $22.5 million that he says has not been paid to him for the 2009 sale of his game studio, id Software, known for such pioneering video game classics as Doom and Quake. The lawsuit reveals that ZeniMax Media paid $150 million for the game studio. The document details that Carmack was set to earn $45 million from the id acquisition. In 2011, Carmack converted half of that note into a half-million shares of ZeniMax common stock, but has yet to receive the other half of his earnings in cash or common stock from the company, despite formal requests being made. The lawsuit was reported first by Dallas News.

Comments

Re:A paltry $150 million?

[frovingslosh]

Quoting from Wikipedia (which is well known for never being wrong): "Ultima Underworld has been cited as the first role-playing game to feature first-person action in a 3D environment, and it introduced technological innovations such as allowing the player to look up and down.". I remembering seeing it just before I saw Wolfenstein, and it was much richer. In addition to being able to look up and down, the playing surface wasn't all on the same level, you could step up or down (I don't think that paths could actually cross over each other, although I'm not certain of that), and walls were not always of straight unit lengths, there were curved walls and other refinements that made Wolfenstein look crude. Of course, it was a commercial game and Wolfenstein was shareware (for the first part) so Wolfenstein got lots more play and attention.