John Carmack, the game programmer who helped usher in the era of 3-D polygonal gaming with Doom and Quake, has joined virtual reality company Oculus as its chief technology officer, the firm announced Wednesday.

Oculus is currently developing Rift, a low-cost, high-quality VR headset that has garnered rave reviews from anyone lucky enough to try out the early versions. Carmack has been one of the top evangelists for the hardware since its inception, porting games to the hardware and appearing at trade shows to show off early prototypes.

"I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on," Carmack wrote in a note posted to Oculus' blog. "Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto [Oculus founder] Palmer [Luckey]'s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time."

In addition to his ongoing work leading game technology development at Doom maker id Software, Carmack founded a private aerospace startup called Armadillo Aerospace in 2000. Days ago, Carmack told Ars Technica that he was "winding down" Armadillo, into which he has invested $8 million of his personal fortune so far.

"I'm more excited about the virtual reality work that's going on and software stuff than rocketry," he told Ars Technica.

On Twitter, Carmack said he would devote his efforts to Oculus, id and Armadillo in that order.