Instead of pursuing legal action, at Carmack's behest id Software used the patches as the foundation for a company-sanctioned Linux port.

When the source code to Quake was stolen and circulated among the Quake community underground, a programmer unaffiliated with id Software used it to port Quake to Linux, and subsequently sent the patches to Carmack. Carmack's engines have been licensed for use in other influential action games such as Hexen, Half-Life, and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.Ĭarmack works to promote open source philosophy and fan feedback in his game designs. He has invented several graphical rendering algorithms, notably surface caching and Carmack's Reverse. He was the main developer of several seminal titles including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, as well as their newer followups (including Doom 3 and the rest of the Quake series). In 1990, Carmack, Romero, and others created the first of the Commander Keen series, which would be published as shareware by Apogee Software from 1991 onwards.Ĭarmack's most recognized accomplishments are in programming first-person shooter games. 3 using this technology was created and pitched to Nintendo, but they declined further development due to lack of interest in the PC market. Afterwards most of that team left Softdisk to form id Software in particular, Carmack had created a breakthrough demo of smooth 2D scrolling under MS-DOS which the team considered 'too big' for Softdisk.

Shreveport, Louisiana software company Softdisk hired Carmack after a series of successful contract assignments, uniting him with John Romero and other future members of id Software. He graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School, then attended University of Missouri–Kansas City for two semesters before dropping out to work as a freelance programmer. John Carmack grew up in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, part of the Kansas City metropolitan area, and became interested in computers at an early age.

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