Re:Translation please... (Score 1)

While the rest of us are working on mundane tasks like finding memoy leaks or off-by-one bugs, Carmack is in a virtual role-play reality where his character class is a combo scientist/scholar/tinkerer/engineer, hacking the matrix. I mean come on, what has he done besides FPSes? He didn't invent the genre, he just co-created a really popular one. I mean, not that that's easy to do, but he's no Sid Meier.

I don't think John Carmack would ever claim to be Sid Meier. He isn't a game designer. He's a game engine designer, and a damn good one at that. The way I see it, he's contributed two incredibly significant things to the gaming world:

1. The Doom Engine (yes, I know Wolf3D and ROTT were there first... DOOM was far better and more influential than either)
2. GLQuake

These two contributions are, individually, as important than any other gaming technological innovation that I can think of.