COMPANY id Software Owner and Lead Programmer
For some people, computer games are the reason they own a computer. For others, they're the reason kids are killing each other. We have John Carmack to thank--or blame.
Carmack perfected the shockingly violent and compellingly immersive genre of computer game known as the first-person shooter, in which players roam around a 3-D world seen from the point of view of a character inside that world--generally a character who has a rocket launcher and a serious grudge to settle. In the early '90s, Carmack and his colleagues at id Software developed the complex technology that makes those games possible. Castle Wolfenstein, Doom and most recently the Quake series are among his creations.

There are hard-core gamers for whom Quake is a way of life, but the first-person shooter really entered mainstream consciousness this spring during the media frenzy surrounding the Columbine massacre. The two killers were reportedly Doom and Quake freaks, and soon "experts" were crawling out of the woodwork to testify that first-person shooter games train children to be merciless and efficient snipers. The connection may be speculative at best, but the Marines are convinced: they have trained fighters with Carmack's games for years.

Carmack himself has stayed out of the fray. Tall, thin, pale, ponytailed, he looks the part of the self-taught programming genius. His only known vice is his high-performance Ferraris. In his field, nobody is more respected or influential: when Steve Jobs wanted to get the Macintosh back on track as a gaming platform, he called Carmack to figure out how.

His next challenge: Quake III, due out this fall, which will feature faster, more detailed play as well as smarter enemies and less Internet lag. The slaughter will be more real than ever. And isn’t that what people want?

When Microsoft tried to launch a graphics standard for PC hardware in the early ‘90s, John Carmack, the ace programmer behind some of the hottest games ever created for the PC, stayed away from it. Eight years later, Mr. Carmack is still steering clear of Microsoft’s standard as he cranks out the next version of Id Software’s Doom.

“It’s almost like a religious thing for him,” grumbles Otto Berkes, a Microsoft program manager who until recently oversaw the company’s DirectX graphics technology division. Unlike Mr. Carmack, many other game developers have adopted the technology.

Mr. Carmack, cofounder and lead programmer at Id Software, is sticking to his own graphics technology. He is an absolute techno-purist who seeks to produce a common code that can run on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh operating systems--something he can’t do with Microsoft’s technology. And by being such a purist, he delights hard-core gamers and graphics experts. Among programmers, he is lionized for his advocacy of openness, particularly for allowing Id Software’s game engines to be used to create an infinite number of customized versions of its games. And among gamers, he is praised for unapologetically making the highly realistic and ultraviolent shooting games that delight young males and horrify parents and politicians.

Mr. Carmack is unique in another way. His success demonstrates an alternative path for entrepreneurs. Id Software, in Mesquite, Texas, started small and self-funded, and is staying small even as it rakes in tens of millions of dollars from its games and game-technology licensing fees. “All we could get out of growth is more money,” says Mr. Carmack, a multimillionaire. “More money is not a major motivator for me.”

This self-imposed restraint is rare in a world that believes, in the immortal words of Dr. Seuss, “business is business and business must grow.” Id defies conventional business logic by maintaining a staff of only 17 employees, even though the company generates annual revenue of $20 million--more than $1 million per employee.

GRAPHICS PROCESSOR

Mr. Carmack is something of a hermit--at least he was until he met his wife, Katherine Anna Kang, at Id. “I begged him to be more social,” she says. “I would say Mr. Spock is a good description.”
He speaks with a nervous tick that makes him say “ahoom” in between breaths. A coworker was once astounded when the ultra-reserved Mr. Carmack said goodbye to him on his way out of the office. He doesn’t talk much to other programmers, his wife says, because he figures they are like him and just want to be left alone.

Mr. Carmack works a highly organized day, targeting specific goals that usually involve rooting out nasty bugs in his software code. In years past, he would code 80 hours a week; now he is so on top of his game that he works regular hours and spends another 30 hours a week figuring out how to make rockets take off and land vertically. He is even delegating some programming work to others for the first time in years.

“I have no doubt John is wired differently from the rest of us,” says American McGee, a game designer who worked at Id and is now the chief creative officer of his own company, Carbon6 Entertainment, in Los Angeles. “John is a perfectionist in everything he does,” adds Dennis Fong, who made his name as the best tournament player of Mr. Carmack’s games. “He picks the areas where he wants to concentrate his attention and then he goes at it hard-core.”

Mr. Carmack also plays computer games in the office with his coworkers, but he frequently isn’t the best player in the house. When fans ask if they can dedicate Web sites to him, he replies, “Please don’t, please don’t.”

“I am proud that I can be a role model for young programmers,” he says. “But I don’t believe in the extremes of hero worship or cult of personality. I don’t enjoy being a famous person.”
Instead, he is bent on creating solid graphics code, which he then hands over to Id’s artists and designers so they can create the best possible game with it. “People are surprised at how disengaged I can be from the affairs of the company and the games industry,” says Mr. Carmack.

DOOM RAIDER

When Mr. Carmack steps into the spotlight, it’s because of his purist ideas about technology. A few years ago, he publicly criticized Steve Jobs and Apple Computer in an Internet posting for failing to keep up with 3D hardware technology. That led to a tense meeting with Mr. Jobs and, ultimately, an attitude shift at Apple. More recently, Mr. Carmack tangled with Mr. Jobs’s handlers, who wanted to censor his Doom demo for the Macworld trade show in January 2001. He kindly avoided showing any killing or blood, but insisted on keeping the ghoulish images of demons. The demo eventually won approval from Mr. Jobs.

Because his games spur PC sales and, consequently, operating system software sales, he commands the attention of Microsoft’s Bill Gates. When Mr. Carmack complained that PC hardware and software people never met, Mr. Gates held a Windows Graphics Summit. When Mr. Carmack was named to the hall of fame of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences last year--an honor bestowed on only three other individuals from the game industry so far--Mr. Gates sent a video with congratulations that teased, “I just want you to know that I can write slicker and tighter code than John.”

In the world of gaming, Mr. Carmack’s influence has been enormous. His team created the original first-person shooter game, Wolfenstein 3-D, in 1992. It legitimized the shareware movement, starting in 1993 with progressive releases of the Doom franchise, which generated more than $100 million in revenue (even though roughly 15 million copies of the original were downloaded for free). Presaging Internet business models, Id gave away a lot of stuff for free, hooking game addicts and then selling them upgrades. In 1996, Id created the first true 3D game, Quake, and since then the company has played a key role in the development of multiplayer Internet games. Having infiltrated everything from movies to art, such games have become a part of pop culture.

GOD OF SMALL THINGS

Instead of using this success as a springboard for growth, Mr. Carmack and his co-workers have adopted a conservative business philosophy, eschewing the “expand at all costs” attitude. Mr. Carmack notes that the art and programming tasks for today’s games have become so overwhelming that he can never tell when his company will finish developing a game.

Nonetheless, the company is famous for rewarding employees for their Sisyphean labors. Thanks to profit sharing, some employees make $450,000 to $600,000 in a good year. With such pay, the company expects employees to put in long, hard hours, says Todd Hollenshead, Id’s CEO. Even with demanding schedules, employees still have fun. Every day, there is a one-hour Quake death match in which even Mr. Hollenshead participates.
Id stays small because “company building” isn’t part of its “.plan file"--Id parlance for a log on the Internet that fans can read to keep track of daily activities, says Kevin Cloud, an Id co-owner and artist. Creating more game titles would require more employees and would dilute the talents of Mr. Carmack and his brethren.

“We don’t have to have big [development] teams,” Mr. Carmack says. “We don’t have to be like [major game publisher] Electronic Arts.” Id simply does what it’s good at. The development team is now headfirst into the new Doom, which will take computer games one step closer to perfectly lifelike animation--as long as antiviolence censors don’t stop it along the way.
Mr. Carmack demonstrated the new Doom at the recent QuakeCon event in Mesquite, a Dallas suburb best known for its rodeo. He told a faithful crowd that the new Doom will have images comprised of 250,000 polygons, compared with only 10,000 or so in Quake III. That’s not far away from the 1.5 million- polygon characters in the animated film Shrek, which set a new standard for realism for computer-animated cartoon characters.

Much to the audience’s delight, the new game looks like a horror movie. Demons jump through glass windows, baring their hideous fangs. Zombies leap from shadows. It looks like the type of game that is so thrilling to play that gamers will do so over and over again, even though it lacks a narrative plot.
Yet even with a track record of multimillion game sales from Doom and Quake, Mr. Carmack can’t do everything he wants. While he owns about 40 percent of Id, fellow artists Kevin Cloud and Adrian Carmack (no relation to John) hold more than 50 percent. Id launches new projects only by consensus. When the team was debating which project to pursue in 2000, Mr. Carmack and fellow artist Paul Steed wanted to remake Doom. Mr. Cloud and Adrian Carmack were against it. Mr. Steed organized a rebellion and threatened that, even if ordered not to, the employees would simply start work on the new Doom. Mr. Cloud and Adrian Carmack relented, but then, Mr. Carmack wrote on .plan, “the other shoe dropped.”
Mr. Steed had been fired, “in retaliation, over my opposition,” Mr. Carmack wrote in a June 2000 entry on the company’s .plan file. Mr. Cloud then posted a response online, writing that it seemed every Id game involved some “great conflict.” It was a rare glimpse of the inner workings at one of the most admired companies in gaming as it prepared to rework one of the most admired games of all time.
The firing of Mr. Steed points to the limits of Mr. Carmack’s power and the often-heard charge from industry executives that Id sometimes lacks adult supervision. Mr. Hollenshead handles business decisions, like publisher relations and licensing. But he stays out of the creative work and disputes among programmers, designers, and artists. The lack of a referee here and among the company’s owners inevitably leads to clashes. “The ownership is a fairly fundamental problem at Id,” Mr. Carmack admits. “There is not clear leadership on everything we do.”

The owners have since made peace, and development continues apace. For the first time, Mr. Carmack says, it seems that nobody on the development team hates anybody else.

MARKET QUAKER

Mr. Carmack matters because no other game developer is pushing graphics technology the way he is--developing games that require not only the best graphics performance on today’s machines but that will tax tomorrow’s hardware as well. The new Doom likely will require a no less powerful chip than the soon-to-be-released Nvidia GeForce3. This puts him at the top of those who influence the technical specifications for the multibillion-dollar graphics-chip industry. The code that powers his games creates employment for generations of game artists. And many former Id employees have gone on to form a dozen companies in nearby Dallas, making that city the capital of some of the most violent and entertaining games on Earth.
But Mr. Carmack and his company have their critics. Their games are bloody and repetitive. Many former Id employees moved on because they tired of making the same game where players shoot anything that moves. Sales of each game usually top 1 million units, but they don’t reach the lofty heights of less violent and more mainstream video games like Final Fantasy or Pok?mon. Mr. Carmack may never be mainstream in the McDonald’s sense of the word.

That’s just fine with Mr. Carmack. He prefers to work in peace on the new Doom and is mum about its release date. He keeps toiling because he foresees a “golden age of graphics programming.” He expects that game technology will be used to animate films in the near future.
But while he hopes such films will be a “little more stylistic than Friday the 13th,” the wildly successful horror film, he cautions against classifying games as an art form. “That’s not what we’re doing,” Mr. Carmack says. “We’re doing entertainment. Saying it’s art is a kind of sophistry from people who want to aggrandize our industry.”

Tag: John Carmack: Lord of the Games