If anyone is interested in Carmack's backstory I recommend picking up a copy of "Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture." It was published in 2004 so don't expect any of the newer stuff he has done but it is quite the read.
I'm fascinated that Carmack thinks Quake 3 is overlooked. At least among the people I know, Quake 3 is considered the best multiplayer arena shooter of all time.
I really do think its overdue. :)<p>I owe a lot of my knowledge and understanding to having trawled through, building, modifying, cleaning up, refactoring or repurposing a lot of the publically available codes for Quake 1/2/3.<p>Truly an inspiration as a programmer.
I looked up John's net worth. Apparently it's 40M. That surprises me, I would have thought given his involvement in the success of putting Oculus on the map that he would have made out way better from the Facebook acquisition.
I love Doom, but what I've always respected about Carmack is the fact that he actively tries to get better by learning all the time.<p>This guy could easily have just learned C and called it "done", and no one would judge him for it. Instead, he's giving speeches talking about how cool Lisp and Haskell are and that he thinks functional is the way to go.<p>Whether or not he's right about that is a matter of preference, but I think it's cool that he's not content with "knowing enough".