# John Carmack

John Carmack is a brilliant legendary programmer that's contributed mostly to [computer graphics](graphics.md) and stands behind engines of such [game](game.md)s as [Doom](doom.md), [Wolfenstein](wolf3D.md) and [Quake](quake.md). He helped pioneer real-time 3D graphics, created many hacks and [algorithm](algorithm.md)s (e.g. the reverse shadow volume algorithm). He is also a rocket engineer.

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).