The godfather of shooters, John Carmack has joined Oculus VR as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The official Oculus VR blog announced the news earlier this week and the company is predictably happy about it. It’s John flipping Carmack. He invented Doom. What more is there to say? This apparently:
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“John is one of the brightest minds of our generation — pioneer, visionary, and industry legend. There are very few people in the world that can contribute to the Oculus Rift and the future of virtual reality like John can.” There’s truth in those words. Carmack also took a moment to drop a poignant note for the Oculus community.
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!
Carmack joins the Dallas branch of Oculus VR where he’ll hopefully continue to work on the VR integration of his upcoming shooter, Doom 4, says Polygon.
Oculus VR is one of Kickstarter’s most well-funded and received projects. It began funding almost a year ago at US$25 000 (R25 000 00) and today has been funded ten times over, and is sitting at US$2 437 429 (R2 437 4290). Users who pledged US$250 (R2500) or more received a “UNASSEMBLED RIFT PROTOTYPE KIT + DOOM 3 BFG (a special edition of Doom 3)” to play around with. Carmack was even quoted early on saying that “What I’ve got now, is, I honestly think the best VR demo probably the world has ever seen.”
This means everything for the future of Oculus. Carmack is a legend, with games like Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake and Commander Keen part of his gaming resume. If anyone knows 3D gaming, it’s Carmack.
