Michael Abrash and John Carmack: Together Again, This Time - in Oculus VR

Before the wave of reaction to the recent Facebook purchase of the Oculus VR company , the new event “blew up” the news feeds did not have time to lie down. The Oculus Rift team, followed by John Carmack, is joined by another stellar-level specialist, Michael Abrasch , who previously led the VR research team at Valve.

The news is doubly enjoyable - after all, Carmack and Abrash had already worked side by side at one of the brightest periods in the life of id Software. The story says that the creation of the Quake engine was hard enough for Carmack - throwing all his strength on him, John was working only on him around the clock, but all the same it was impossible to solve all the problems. John began to convince Michael Abrash - already at that time one of the most talented graphic programmers, whom Carmack really admired - to join him and lured him from Microsoft, where he worked on graphics and assembly parts in Windows NT 3.1. He was one of those programmers who likes to solve the most difficult and interesting tasks, and could not resist the proposal of Carmack.

So in the mid-1990s, Abrash joined id Software to work on Quake and, as we all know today, helped John resolve all the critical issues of creating a real three-dimensional engine. In those days, Michael also took part in the development of Doom. After Quake was released, Abrash returned to Microsoft, where he worked on the recognition of natural languages, then moved to the Xbox team until 2001.

In 2011, after several years of persuasion Gabe Newell, Abrash went to work at Valve, where he seriously engaged in the study of virtual reality. And in January of this year, spoke on Steam Dev Days, telling about the future achievements in the world of VR:
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Why did he join Oculus? He was convinced by the decisive move of Facebook. Abrash, in his report, stated that “the development of virtual reality devices is not so much a theoretical study, as it is a hard work of engineers, which cannot be dispensed with expensive“ hardware ”. Unlocking all the possibilities of VR will take decades, but a solid financial basis will not only shorten this period, but also achieve serious results in the near future. ”

John has already expressed his joy in this regard, and he also added encouragingly that Facebook will not interfere in the affairs of the Oculus Rift team until they ask for it (more specifically, in the case of a financial failure of the device).

In the meantime, the jokes had already gone that the good old id had begun to gather back :) As they say, there is a joke in every joke - after all, from the beginning of the year five people have already passed from id Software to Oculus.