The father of FPS games might re-engage with some of his older work this way.

For a few years, John Carmack was a Bethesda employee, as Zenimax (the owners of Bethesda) bought id Software in 2009. This team needs no introduction (Wolfenstein, DOOM, Quake…). However, Carmack resigned in 2013 to work on virtual reality. The situation got worse in 2014, as Zenimax filed a lawsuit against Oculus, the new employer of Carmack, claiming they stole intellectual properties from Zenimax to create the Oculus Rift.

Then Zenimax blamed Carmack directly by saying he stole several thousands of internal documents, as well as an internal development tool when he left id Software. Then, the genius with the glasses filed a lawsuit against Zenimax for 22.5 million dollars, money he said was still owed on the id Software buyout. This was settled in late 2018, but there’s likely still bad blood between the two parties.

Now that Microsoft acquired Zeinmax, Carmack seems quite supportive about this buyout: „Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs, and they don’t have a grudge against me, so maybe I will be able to re-engage with some of my old titles,” he wrote on Twitter. He has a point: Microsoft’s and Oculus’/Facebook’s partnership isn’t antagonistic.

As Carmack is nowadays working on AGI (artificial general intelligence), he’s not full-time at Oculus, meaning Microsoft could pull a big move to bring him back to id Software, where he helped create Wolfenstein, DOOM, Quake, and even Commander Keen… and Tom Hall (who also had this role for DOOM and Commander Keen) in a reply tweet seems to have hinted at the latter, too.

The next console generation is going to be an interesting period, there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Source: PCGamer

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