As of now, we all know that Doom and Quake creator, the legendary John Carmack joined Oculus VR as chief technology officer. However, what we didn’t know what exactly was his function in the company. Now, new reports are coming in that Carmack is creating a new internal game with the guys at Oculus. And it doesn’t need much to understand that somebody of Carmack’s caliber will ever be away from what he enjoys doing the most – developing titles.
CEO Brendan Iribe and Director of Developer Relations Aaron Davies were recently in an interview with Engadget where both of them shed some light on Carmack’s involvement in the company and what he is up to these days.
"He's working on a lot of exciting tech," Iribe stated about Carmack's role. "But, his heart and soul and history certainly lies in the game-development side."
And on quizzed whether this means, like Epic Games before them and id Software before Epic, Carmack is working on an entirely new game that will be based on the Rift's numerous functions, Iribe stated: "That's always been Epic's philosophy. And it's what allowed them to make what they made. It's certainly been id's philosophy in the past. It's been John Carmack's philosophy -- you gotta eat your own dog food here, and develop internal content also.”
"You'll see, over the next six to 12 months, if you monitor the careers page, we are putting up our team out there. We wanna make this a very open company. Pay attention to that page and you'll see more and more game developers showing up," Iribe added.
As far as the Rift, itself, is concerned, the new VR headset is scheduled to ship later this year with some sort of UI built in for navigation and management. And while that sounds like an exciting prospect, it is even more exciting to know that all this is happening in-house at Oculus VR.
The last time the Rift was in news for something that’s overtly major and exciting was back in July when it was revealed via Iribe that the company is interested in bringing the platform over to consoles and smartphones.