Fifteen years ago, I was living outside Geneva, Switzerland, spending my lunch hours screwing around on the nascent Web a few dozen kilometers from where it was created. I popped into chat rooms, forums, and news sites, and I e-mailed family back home. I was learning French and getting my dose of tech news by reading the French-language edition of Macworld magazine. (Génial!)

I returned Stateside mere months after Ars began, reading more and more about the people behind many of the technologies that I was becoming increasingly fascinated with. I consumed just about every book I could find describing the history and personalities behind graphical user interfaces, networking, the Internet itself, and more.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all that, it’s that most people involved in technology continue the Newtonian tradition of humility. The most iconic innovators all seem to readily acknowledge that they stand on the shoulders of giants. In fact, when I met Vint Cerf and thanked him for making the work I do possible, he was a predictable gentleman, saying, “There were many others involved in the creation of TCP/IP, not just me.”

Any of the dozens of tech innovators we all admire can accurately be described as “rebels,” defying conventional wisdom, corporate logic, and social near-sightedness to create something truly revolutionary. Cerf, of course, is probably the original Internet-based tech rebel—heck, he essentially invented (OK, co-invented) the thing! But as Ars continues reflecting on the last 15 years, it’s been hard to narrow down our list of tech rebels to the most influential three. Cerf is outside of this article for the time being.

In the end, we hope our trio of individual tech rebels represents a wide range of Ars' favorite technologies. They've impacted video games, technology policy, and the distribution of data itself. So for the final list in our "15 years of Ars" series, we'll look at the influence of John Carmack (creator of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake), Shawn Fanning (creator of Napster), and finally Tim Wu (Internet policy scholar and the person who coined the phrase “net neutrality”).

John Carmack

In my senior year of high school, many of my lunch breaks were spent with other nerdy friends blasting each other away on Quake III. Using the latest Apple Power Macintosh G3—with its blueberry-colored side-opening door—we gleefully jumped from platform to platform, scoring Quad Damage and lusting after the BFG. Of course, before Quake III there was Doom, and before that there was Wolfenstein. And one of the chief programmers throughout all three was John Carmack (who describes himself as a “regular” Ars reader, in fact).

He told Ars that many of his creative innovations in video game design come from a simple premise: making video games more awesome.

“The early games, like Wolfenstein, were Gauntlet with a change in perspective,” he said. “There was a clear sense that instead of looking down, [what if] you were in that position? That change in perspective was a significant thing. [Then later, the idea became] wouldn't it be awesome if your friends were in there with you? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could do that over the Internet? Or if people could modify the source code?”

Of course, Wolfenstein 3D was really one of the first games to popularize the first-person shooter genre. Today’s most popular games (we’re looking at you, Call of Duty) can be traced back to the adventures of William "B.J." Blazkowicz and the vertical scanline scaling algorithm that created relatively good 3D rendering at the time. But even with that legacy, Carmack doesn’t want to take all the credit.

“The people that do the charming and fun things in the games are the designers and the artists,” Carmack said. “While I have been the driving technical force there, it's been unfair for all the other people that worked on the things that you remember from Doom. That's all other people and it's often unfair how much credit I get for things.”

Even further, Carmack thinks the innovations that he and his team put into titles like Doom were inevitable. It's the Vint Cerf conundrum all over again—a person many view as an ultimate innovator insists that someone else, in due time, could have done it just the same. In Carmack's view, the tech back then was just less approachable.

“I'm not a key historical person on this," Carmack insisted. "While I was the first to do a lot of things, I have little doubt that other people would have come up with them. There's a tech determination—when things are easy and possible, people will do it. It's fair to say that we did some things earlier maybe than they would have been. Now with these 3D graphics, anybody can pop up OpenGL bindings. Twenty years ago, trying to write a graphic raster that didn't have cracks between the polygons was something that only a few people in the industry could pull off at the time. But writing these primitive things was a huge challenge back then.”

How Mario almost got in Wolfenstein's way Without Carmack's work on Wolfenstein 3D leading the way, the gaming industry's shift from a 2D focus to today's 3D-dominated world may have been delayed for years. In fact, that situation almost came to pass. Without Carmack's work on Wolfenstein 3D leading the way, the gaming industry's shift from a 2D focus to today's 3D-dominated world may have been delayed for years. In fact, that situation almost came to pass. As David Kushner memorably lays out in his book Masters of Doom, Carmack and his colleagues managed to come up with one of the first smooth side-scrolling algorithms designed for the PC way back in September of 1990. While PC side-scrollers at the time usually had clunky, screen-clearing transitions when a character got to the edge of the screen, this algorithm allowed for much smoother background movement, as seen in console games like Super Mario Bros. 3, by only redrawing the elements of the screen that actually changed frame to frame. Carmack and company actually coded up a near-perfect PC conversion of Super Mario Bros. 3 (originally titled "Dangerous Dave in 'Copyright Infringement'") and presented it to Nintendo in the hopes of gaining a lucrative licensing contract. When Nintendo declined (it wasn't interested in the PC market), the tech was funneled into the Commander Keen games, and Carmack and co. went on to focus on their revolutionary leaps in 3D gaming. But if Nintendo had answered differently and Carmack had stayed focused on advancing 2D gaming on PCs for business reasons, the entire history of the video game industry could have been altered significantly.

-Kyle Orland



Regardless of who could or couldn't make the games—or who does or doesn't deserve credit—the end result isn't up for debate. Carmack worked on a number of all-time classics that many gamers have spent countless hours playing. I still have a special place in my heart for Quake III, and I had to ask: did Carmack have a favorite child among all these titles?

“My personal favorite game that we've done was Quake III. It's pure play on it,” he said. “It was a hardware-accelerated game. Nothing but death match action on there—[back] when simple products like that were acceptable. It wasn't our best-selling [title], [but that was back] when something that simple could be a viable product. I was really happy that when mobile came along with the more ‘pure’ games, they didn't have to be a $50 game that had man-centuries in them."

That hat-tip to mobile gaming shows that Carmack's affection for Quake III strongly influences his interests today. He's impressed that FPSes have evolved into such variety, but effective games with a simple concept at their core directly hit the Carmack soft spot.

"In Cut The Rope, you have the rope dynamics and that's still really great. You can have these small things that cost people a couple bucks," he noted. "That's really nice—rather than justifying a $60 game that you're going to be playing it for a dozen or more hours. I don't have a lot of free time and I don't have 50 hours for Skyrim. That's not to take anything away from the massive titles, but it's great to have this broad spectrum of gaming, and each one has its own interest on the development side of things.”

Carmack's other qualm with modern gaming gets back to his FPS core: as video games have gotten more complex in terms of gameplay and graphics, they’ve gotten more violent, bloody, and realistic. Some of Carmack's work could be seen as a precursor to this landscape, but he draws a distinction.

“One of the things that I was always proud of was when Doom was a Congressional prop,” Carmack said with a chuckle. “I always felt that we had a strong moral high ground; there is no moral ambiguity when you are fighting demons and zombies. I did have some qualms when I saw Grand Theft Auto, saying that I would never insinuate that it 'should not' be available to people but it wasn't something that I felt really good about. Rage—we had people in it, which was something jarring. But I liked it better when we were shooting nothing but demons and zombies."

These days, Carmack has two young sons of his own, which inevitably shapes his current relationship with some of those classic titles. "I do wish the games that I made were more things that I could share with my sons," he said. "I've often thought that it would be nice to make something that's family friendly, like another Commander Keen, but that's always a tough thing to do." As a whole, however, Carmack sees the positives outweighing any negatives when it comes to video games today. He sees his eldest son playing Minecraft and embracing its qualities of problem solving and creativity. "I hold out hope that there can be positive aspects to the games. It's never going to be the central focus, but the games are there to be fun.”

As for what's coming next, Carmack admits his role will be more on the technical side. His design skills "probably tapped out a decade ago. I don't have anything to say about design beyond the Quake III level.” But even in his new and unfamiliar roles, he's excited to see what tomorrow's designers can do. Some may see the dark side to new innovations like Google Glass or other augmented reality devices, but Carmack believes in the value of these new platforms.

“Where it all winds up is you end up with The Matrix—do you just let people drool?" he said. "That's not necessarily dystopian if everyone can be a king. So many people can have such a large fraction of their life on the net: you have your challenges, entertainment, work, and they're happening in an essentially virtual space. Is it such a dystopian thing after all?”