Today is John Carmack’s 37th birthday! If you are into video games, this name will, without any doubt, sound very familiar. Carmack is one of the people responsible for some of the greatest video games of all time, such as the Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. He was the first programmer to achieve smooth scrolling on a PC (pioneered in Commander Keen) and made the first successful first person shooters.
John Carmack, born on August 20 1970, started programming at a very young age, on the Apple II computer. When he got a job developing games for Softdisk, a shareware subscription magazine, he met John Romero and Adrian Carmack (not related). They felt they couldn’t make the games they wanted at Softdisk, so after a while they left and started their own game company: id Software (pronounced ‘it’, not ‘idea’), wich we all know, of course, as the company that made Doom and Quake. Doom is still considered one of the most legendary games of all time. After Quake, the difference of opinion between John Carmack and John Romero had become too big and Romero was fired. Full of confidence, he started his own company (Ion Storm) and began working on the most notorious game ever: Daikatana. Romero got fired again after that. He’s still developing games today, but he doesn’t like drawing too much attention anymore.
Besides a game developer, Carmack is also a rocketry enthousiast, just like Billy Blaze, the hero from Commander Keen. He is the founder of Armadillo Aerospace and designs rocket that he hopes will go into orbit one day. He is also a strong supporter of open source software and a fanatic opponent of patenting. He once treatened to leave id Software if anybody ever patented anything. The source code of Doom and Quake one to three has been released under the GPL.

So, happy birthday, mr. Carmack!