John Carmack is a leading icon of the games industry. He grew up in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, and became interested in computers at a very early age. After leaving his studies at the University of Kansas after two terms, he went on to become a freelance programmer.

Soon after, small development company SoftDisk hired Carmack and introduced him to John Romero and several others who would be known in the future as iD Software. Whilst employed at SoftDisk, Carmack helped produce entertainment software for Gamer's Edge, a sub-division of the company, by writing the engines behind the games.

Whilst working at SoftDisk, Carmack, John Romero and Adrian Carmack set up IFD, or Ideas From the Deep. It was during this time the Commander Keen series was born and it was through this venture that IFD generated enough capital to leave SoftDisk behind and set the company full-time. Eventually, in February of 1991, IFD changed its name to iD Software, the company as we know it today.

18 months after the name change, the iD Software team had become bored of the Commander Keen series and soon moved onto something more adventurous - thus Wolfeinstein 3D was created. Despite the huge success of this game, Carmack wasn’t happy with the rendering of the game and quickly moved to a more expressive renderer capable of displaying a kind of realism that was revolutionary in its time. And so Doom was born.

Software Highlights from Credited Titles

John Carmack's first video game work that SPOnG is aware of is the 1990 title, "Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars" (PC) as Lead Programmer. Of the titles listing John within the credits , "Quake 2" (N64) and "Quake III Arena" (PC) have been best selling titles.

John's most recent involvement was as Lead Programmer on the 1999 release "Quake III Arena" (PC).

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