The man known as The Magnificent Carmack was born on August 20, 1970 in Shawnee Mission, Kansas.
Carmack tinkering with chemistry games, building rockets, reading science fiction, when personal computers came along, he was hooked for life. Carmack and his friends became obsessed with computers, but the school they attended couldn’t afford them.
As a result, when he was fourteen, Carmack and some of his classmates broke into a school in a wealthy neighborhood to steal an Apple II computer. They were caught, and Carmack spent the following year in the juvenile detention center.
When Carmack was released he became a rebellious teenager and launched into programming. He would lock himself in his room for days and learn to write programming code. Carmack’s parents knew their son was very bright and had a good deal of chance.
In 1988 he enrolled at the University of Missourinear Kansas City. He took only computer classes, and after two semesters he dropped out to devote himself full-time to programming. Carmack briefly worked as an independent contractor for Apple II, but made very little money.
He eventually landed a steady programming job with Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana. One of his early jobs was developing a two-dimensional arcade video game called Invasion of the Vorticons.
Carmack with two fellow computer scientists, John Romero and Adrian Carmack, created his own video game called Commander Keen, which was distributed by Apogee Software.
Spurred by the success of the game, he formed his own company, id Software. Later that year the company moved to its current headquarters located in Dallas, Texas.
While brainstorming ideas for his company, Carmack and Romero created the game Wolfenstein 3-D, which became a success when it was released in 1991.
Wolfenstein was so popular that each of its creators were making about $ 120,000 per month, and Carmack, a college dropout, was a wealthy man at the age of twenty-one. However, he did not fall asleep on his success.
His greatest success came in 1993 with the long-awaited release of Doom, where he created a virtual world in three dimensions so powerful, compelling and disturbing that it would change the real world around him.
Users couldn’t get enough of Doom, which reached sales of more than $ 7 million in 1994 alone. It eventually became one of the best-selling video games of all time and spawned a Doom series.
Carmack and Romero became legends. In 1996, the duo followed up with Quake, which offers a higher level of gritty realism. Quake became both a best-seller and a cult favorite. Quake II was later released in 1996, Quake III Arena it came out in 2000. Quake III is an Internet-based game that allows a large number of participants to play at the same time.
Despite its phenomenal success, tempers flared between Carmack and Romero, and decided to separate on good terms.
Undoubtedly, technology that Carmack has been copied by other programmers as it is considered the pioneer of the industry.
Although John Carmack is a billionaire, and his company makes about $ 20 million a year, he is still a workaholic.
Carmack and his wife, Anna Kang, had their first child in 2004, now he comes home around midnight instead of 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM. Kang, however, insists that Sunday is family day.
In 2005, Carmack was thirty-five years old and had been writing computer programs for almost twenty years. This made him almost an elder in the video game industry, and rumors that he was thinking of retiring. It was quickly disproved.
Carmack kept working hard on developing new games including: Half-life Y Medal of Honor.
In 2011 he worked on a new graphics engine called “id Tech 5“. Later they will use the” id Tech 5 “in “Doom 4”.