It's obvious for me that the OP was kinda jealous about Carmack, but it appears to me that he's also pretty knowledgeable.
This guy was the major driving force for the FPS genre and the adoption of GPUs
I think you are giving Carmack too much credit.
He's technologically obsessed, which was very useful for Doom and Quake.
However, a game doesn't simply rely on engineering: it requires a strong gameplay and nice graphics.
Games with excellent gameplay can overcome lack of engineering and graphics, but games with excellent engineering cannot overcome lack of gameplay.
Of course, it's more glamorous to design 3D engines than to design gameplay, but the real game comes from gameplay (and yes, I was a game programmer, and I love engineering).
In my opinion, ID's success is because of multiple lucky factors:
- - technical obsession from Carmak (and Abrash)
- - gameplay obsession from Romero
- - they were also the first ones to combine such excellency in a single company (I'm pretty sure that they had also an excellent graphical team, which had to work with lots of graphical constraints)
- - Quake 2 was released at a moment 3D cards needed games, so all 3D card providers pushed the game
Maybe 5 years for now you'll be raving about how good his VR headsets are.
I'm pretty sure that you are wrong, and here are my arguments:
- - Carmack is a software guy. Unless he totally changed, he's still thinking in software terms, which can be quite useful if you need to think about software developments (like frameworks), but useless when you work on hardware
- - there is absolutely no way to predict or force a success: look at how much nice products failed, while poor products succeeded. Success comes from circumstances and luck.
- - Carmack was lucky once, and I doubt he'll be lucky twice
you'll be raving about how good his VR headsets are
I'm pretty disturbed by this sentence: do you imply that Carmack will design the VR headsets alone ?
Frankly, this will be result of a team's work, and there is no guarantee of success even if you have a team of geniuses (think about the collision of egos).