Michael Abrash and John Carmack: back together, this time in Oculus VR

Before the wave of reaction to the recent Facebook purchase of Oculus VR , the new event “blew up” the news feeds. Another star-level specialist joins the Oculus Rift team, following John Carmack , is Michael Abrash , who previously led the VR research team at Valve.

The news is doubly pleasant - after all, Carmack and Abrash already worked side by side in one of the brightest periods of life id Software. The story goes that Carmack was not easy enough to create the Quake engine - throwing all his strength at him, John worked on it alone around the clock, but he still couldn’t solve all the problems. John began to convince Michael Abrash - already at that time one of the most talented graphics programmers whom Carmack genuinely admired - to join him and lured him from Microsoft, where he was engaged in graphics and assembler 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 offer of Carmack.

So in the mid-1990s, Abrash joined id Software to work on Quake and, as we all know today, helped John solve 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 natural language recognition, then moved to the Xbox team until 2001.

In 2011, after several years of persuasion by Gabe Newell, Abrash went to work at Valve, where he seriously engaged in the study of virtual reality. And in January of this year, he spoke on Steam Dev Days, talking about upcoming achievements in the VR world:



Why did he join Oculus? He was convinced by the decisive move of Facebook. Abrash said in his message that “the development of virtual reality devices is not so much a theoretical study as the hard work of engineers, which can not do without expensive hardware. Revealing all the capabilities of VR will take decades, but a solid financial basis will not only reduce this period, but also achieve serious results in the near future. ”

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

Meanwhile, jokes have already begun that the good old id began to gather back :) As they say, every joke has a fraction of a joke - after all, since the beginning of the year, five people have already transferred from id Software to Osulus.