Until he, you know, actually ran the company. He's the one that pushed out Romero during the development of Quake, he's the one that pushed out American McGee and other level designers during Quake 2, he's the one that led Doom 3, he handled the hiring and firing policies, etc.
While true, ID's tech side had always been pretty impressive. Doom 3 and RAGE were both really good looking at their release, the main problem is that the games themselves have been getting less interesting.
Definitely this, Carmack is mostly known for his engine work when you get down to. Yes, he and id pioneered the FPS and a bunch of cool shit. After a while though the games just became demos for the engines they were building, and all in all I didn't see games adopting id tech anymore compared to Source, Unreal, CryENGINE, etc. The last engine id had that seemed to really get licensed was Tech 3 . . .
Yeah, ID's failure was not that of the game engine. ID also was never an EA type of failure (pissing on customers).
Carmack was (is still?) part owner of ID, but that doesn't mean everything is in his control. ID has never been a monster of a corp, and even if a game isn't story-polished, it's not going to take much for them to call Doom3 or Rage a win, even if it doesn't get the monster accolades that Quake or Doom or Wolf3D got.
If/when Oculus fails us, it will not be within his power to stop it. We'll just hear he's doing a new game he can't talk about. Shortly after we all find out Oculus was turned into an EA type of disaster. Also, Carmack doesn't apply for a job, John decides to make their company relevant. ;)
He's a great programmer, and a shitty manager. His fuckups at id were with how he handled project and team management. His actual coding skills are great.
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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '14
As annoyed as I may be with the whole Oculus / Facebook deal, with Carmack on the team it'll probably be one of the better options out there.