John Carmack joins Oculus VR as Chief Technology Officer

Oculus VR announced yesterday that John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and all-around legend in the games industry, will be joining the company as the Chief Technology Officer.

Oculus VR is, of course, the company behind the Oculus Rift headset, shown above. Carmack was a vocal supporter of the technology almost immediately, along side companies like Valve and Mojang. A tweet from id Software has clarified that Carmack won’t be leaving the company he helped found, either. And then there’s Armadillo Aerospace. Carmack tweeted that his “time division is now Oculus over Id over Armadillo.” He added, simply, “Busy busy busy!”

So, for the time being, Carmack is staying involved with all three companies in some way. Id has been rumored to be in trouble for some time with difficulties getting Doom 4 out the door on top of disappointing sales of Rage, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if he left the company entirely at some point.

Oculus VR seems like a great fit for Carmack. He’s had an impressive influence on the industry over the years, starting the first-person genre with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and pioneering a variety of programming techniques. Id was also one of the first companies to license one of their game engines out for use in other companies’ games. His position at Oculus VR should give him another opportunity to help revolutionize games yet again.

Looking back at his games, they were often more important as technical and crafting achievements; the game mechanics themselves added little, but the tech powering the games has always been important. Putting the game content aside to focus on the technology behind the games could be just what we’ve been waiting for to see something new come from the living legend.

JoyStick