Early Life

John Carmack, the boy genius, was born on August 20, 1970, in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. He has, in his own words, a normal geek-gifted childhood.’ From a very young age, John became obsessed with games. His life consisted of various science fiction books and John Carmack’s favorite role-playing game, Dragon and the Dungeons. Then personal computers came along, and John was hooked for life!

Due to John Carmack's obsession with computers, he longed for his own. However, due to poor financial crisis, he wasn’t able to. But his love for computers was unstoppable. He and his friends decided to steal a computer from a school in the wealthier neighborhood. Being his genius, John invented a very creative way to break into the school using thermite and Vaseline. However, they were caught. John had to spend a year in Juvenile prison. And as one can expect, it wasn’t a happy experience for him. After being released, John became rebellious. The only thing that didn’t change was his love for computers. He would lock himself in his bedroom for hours, learning about coding and programming.

John Carmack’s parents knew he was a bright child, so they forced him to attend college. His out-of-the-box mind, however, could not adjust to the standard norms of life, so he dropped out.

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Softdisk

After struggling with petty programming jobs, John Carmack finally got a stable job at Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Although he was already developing games for Softdisk, John’s dream was different. He wanted to take the entire gaming industry to a whole different level. His partners in this dream were his colleagues from Softdisk, John Romero, and Ardian Carmack. They would create games for Softdisk during the day, load up their cars with company equipment at night, and stay up until the early morning hours experimenting with coding. After years of trying, their hard work finally paid off, and they launched their very first game, Commander Keen. Spurred by the success of their game, they quit Softdisk and started their own company – id Software.

id Software & Armadillo Aerospace

id Software’s first venture was the Wolfenstein 3-D which was an upgraded version of John Carmack’s favourite childhood game, Castle Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein was so popular that each of its creators were making about $120,000 per month, and Carmack, the college dropout, was a wealthy man at the age of twenty-one.

Besides gaming, John had another obsession. Rockets! In 2000, John Carmack spent some of his millions to make his dream of traveling to space a reality. He purchased a cavernous warehouse in Mesquite and a 100-acre testing ground and formed Armadillo Aerospace. Carmack is the undisputed ringleader, assisted by a half-dozen rocket enthusiasts at Armadillo’s fully equipped machine shop and laboratory.

All of the workers are unpaid and volunteer their time two times a week. Some have built rockets before, and others have become versed in space travel testing and space regulations. They all, however, share the same goal: to one day make space travel accessible to the average citizen.

Carmack the magnificent

Although John Carmack is a multimillionaire, and his company brings in close to $20 million a year, he is still a self-described workaholic. Carmack has lots of fans who view him as a coder supreme, but he also has critics who denounce his games because they are perceived as ultra-violent. The techie from Texas, however, cares little about public opinion.

John lives and breathes computers and is always looking for the next challenge. As one of his coworkers commented to the Dallas Morning News, “The things that motivate John are the things that put him out on the edge of discovery.”

John Carmack is the true definition of ‘Dream it, believe it, do it!’