John Carmack paves the way. He creates revolutionary
3D engines, which his company soups up with some basic stuff like single player, and then licenses the engines to let OTHER people make excellent single player games (read:
half life (NOT CS),
heretic 2,
scoure of armagon, etc). After countless numbers of game engines (I still have his c (not cpp)
slordax game) he and his company have nailed down the multiplayer game, however, with
quakeworld (internet-enabled
quake1) still being very popular after something like 6 years of existance (not to mention that i played a game of
doom1 over the internet just last week.)
In appearance, John Carmack is somewhat short, has long hair sometimes, and is a really a nice guy. Oh, and he
sure as hell knows what hes doing! :) Even somewhere around the time when "Doom" was released, he was quoted as saying "I am good at what I do." You damn right he is.
Other games that he (and his company,
iD Software hehe) has written include the ever popular
Commander Keen series (which were written after Carmack devised an ingenius "nintendo mario brothers-like" scrolling technique for the PC, ingenius because to get anything to scroll on the incredibly slow PCs of that time required a lot of programming optimization.) As well as Wolfenstein 3D, and so forth. He did not code
Catacomb Abyss, which works on a similar principle as wolf3d, yet came earlier. When asked who he would most like to work with, Carmack mentioned another programming hero of mine,
Ken Silverman (Ken coded the
Build engine used in such games as
Duke3d,
Shadow Warrior, and also created a number of other complex 3D projects, including a solar system simulator (all on his site, http://www.advsys.net/ken/)
As for his
cars, after the explosion of
Wolfenstein 3D made him rich (and all the games after that), he has been buying
Ferraris (and working on them by himself too, i hear, indeed hes a Jack of many trades :).
Of course, the day came when his garage ran out of space, so he put up very first Ferrari that he got (I forget the model) as the first prize for the 1997 Quake 1 competition "Red Annihilation."
Thresh won that Ferrari (with a ridiculous score of 14 to -1 over Entropy), and when asked how fast it goes, revealed nothing but a modest 115 mph (on a runway of course) despite pleas from the interviewers :).