John Carmack is a brilliant legendary programmer that's contributed mostly to [computer graphics](graphics.md) and stands behind engines of such [games](game.md) as [Doom](doom.md), [Wolfenstein](wolf3D.md) and [Quake](quake.md). He helped pioneer real-time 3D graphics, created many [hacks](hack.md) and [algorithms](algorithm.md) (e.g. the reverse shadow volume algorithm). He is also a rocket [engineer](engineer.md).
He's kind of the ridiculously stereotypical [nerd](nerd.md) with glasses that just from the way he talks gives out the impression of someone with high functioning [autism](autism.md). You can just sense his [IQ](iq.md) is over 9000. Some nice [shit](shit.md) about him can be read in the (sadly [proprietary](proprietary.md)) book *Masters of Doom*.
Carmack is a proponent of [FOSS](foss.md) and has released his old game engines as such which gave rise to an enormous amount of modifications, forked engines and even new games (e.g. [Freedoom](freedoom.md) and [Xonotic](xonotic.md)). He's probably leaning more towards the dark side of the source: the [open-source](open_source.md). In 2021 Carmack tweeted that he would have rather licensed his old Id engines under a permissive BSD [license](license.md) than the [GPL](gpl.md), which is good.
In 2013 he sadly sold his soul to [Facebook](facebook.md) to work on [VR](vr.md) (in a Facebook owned company Oculus).
