Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The fact that Zenimax corporate, and likely some unknown exec in that machine, had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them. I may not always agree with Carmack from what I've read on twitter (he works for Facebook now) but I have the utmost respect for him, his transparency in his key note lectures, and his supremely engineering focused priorities. His leadership at id Software led to open sourcing of game engines and building modding support in all their titles. This openness and community building became a trend in the PC gaming industry though the 90s and 2000s and ushered a creative golden age that jumpstarted many game development studios and careers. It seems like Zenimax took whatever excitement those early days of PC gaming generated and started extracting consumer dollars with over-produced sequels that treated PCs like another console. They were able to make much more money, but we all came out intellectually impoverished in my opinion.

>had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them.

No kidding. You want to keep a guy like Carmack in the family in whatever capacity you can, because he carries such deep respect in the industry. It was a stupid thing for ZeniMax to burn that bridge.

Carmack's pull as an individual among tech folks, is unrivaled in gaming.

I can bet that many people would willingly taken pay cuts (or more-likely skipped on pay bumps) to work for a team led by Carmack.

Almost all of the other pop-culture figures in game development such as Todd Howard, Kojima and the like are designers, producers or story writers.

Carmack is the only one that is a proper coding guy.

______

Maybe Carmack comes back to lead Windows mixed reality ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and PCVR ? True wishful thinking right here.

I think a few of Nintendo's star players are (and were) coders as well as designers going back to the assembly days.

Late Satoru Iwata famously coded Pokemon Stadium battle system without design document, only by looking at the gameboy source code. He later became Nintendo CEO.

Just wanted to point out a small discrepancy here: As his bio on Twitter says, he's currently an independent AI researcher. But also sometimes consults for Oculus VR, although not actively employed there anymore. [0]

It'd be very interesting to see if his return to Id might spark some changes :)

[0]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

Carmack's Facebook Connect talk last week[1] sure made him sound very plugged into what's happening at Oculus. I was surprised, given that I, too, thought he had essentially left for AI research.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y

I am guessing Carmack "retiring" from Oculus is something akin to "went from 80 hours a week to 40".

yeah he sounded like he was tech lead for the project, i am surprised to learn he's "independent"

Most of the higher level Oculus engineers are very in tune with what is happening within Oculus and the industry. There is constant discussion internally about it, and Oculus still knows more about VR than anybody else. Source: I was one of them.

I think every non-manager employee these days should be "independent." Some may not have noticed, but tech company managers have gone insane and turned their ego up to 11 echoing the current political climate. Anyone who is a famous dev or even a grunt that shows they have basic competency is going to be an immediate management target.

What grudge is he even talking about? The lawsuits?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_v._Oculus

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/oculus-cto-john-carmack-is...

Perhaps, but also perhaps that recent thing where Nine Inch Nails released an LP with the Quake 1 soundtrack [0], had some notes from John Carmack and American McGee to be included with the record and Zenimax forced NIN to remove the notes [1]. Though of course people saved it [2].

[0] https://store.nin.com/products/quake-vinyl

[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1306279981459308546

[2] http://handscandance.com/quake/NINQuakeBooklet.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com