id Software co-founder and main programmer John Carmack now has found a new job: being the Chief Technology Officer for Oculus VR, the company behind the virtual reality goggles known as Oculus Rift, if his recent tweets and the update to the Rift Kickstarter page are any indication. According to Carmack in the Kickstarter page:
“I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It’s certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be awesome!”
My time division is now Oculus over Id over Armadillo. Busy busy busy!
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) August 7, 2013
It is a big change of pace to go from working on carefully engineered code for the long haul to PANICKY STARTUP CODING FOR THE NEXT DEMO.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) August 7, 2013
According to Pete Hines, vice-president of PR and marketing at Bethesda Softworks, “John has long been interested in the work at Oculus VR and wishes to spend time on that project. The technical leadership he provides for games in development at id Software is unaffected.”
The Oculus Rift was a Kickstarter phenomena, raising more than $2.4 million dolllars, well above its $250,000 goal. Current games that support the Oculus Rift are Hawken, Team Fortress 2, Doom 3 BFG Edition, and Doom 4. Dev kits for the Rift were sent out in March.
