One day after speaking at the QuakeCon in Dallas, John Carmack—the famed video game designer and space entrepreneur—confirmed to Ars that he’s “winding down” his company, Armadillo Aerospace. The private space company began in 2000, and eventually began doing contract work for NASA, but it turned to developing reusable rockets in recent years.

“I laid off most of the full-time employees,” Carmack told Ars on Friday. “[We have a few doing some] minor part-time hours, and there’s one guy still on there. We still have the building, and I own materials there, and I don’t have the funding to continue development.”

He said that he’d spent over $1 million a year of his own money to fund the company, which will now be cut significantly.

“I’m spending [somewhere] in the couple hundred thousand [dollar range], we still have to pay accountants, lawyers, and pay for insurance. We're talking to people and we hope that some money shows up, but if not we'll wind down even further.”

Armadillo has struggled since January 2013, when the company hit a speed bump—a rocket’s main parachute didn’t deploy properly and the rocket got pretty dinged up during a rough landing. (Armadillo also had notable setbacks in 2004 and 2006.)

$8 million gone after 12+ years

Two years ago, Carmack pushed to develop a suborbital resuable rocket—and told the Dallas crowd that he had thought the company was within “striking distance of the suborbital cargo markets, the [NASA Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research] payloads.”

“I wouldn't have made the bet two years ago if I didn't think there was a good chance—instead I spent maybe $2.5 million and didn't quite make it," he told Ars. "I’m obviously disappointed about it. While I could personally scare up another $2 million and have another go at it, there's my wife who keeps me from making bad decisions.”

Carmack said that since founding the company in 2000, he’d spent around $8 million of his own money. But even after all of that money, he felt like it wasn’t enough to go as fast as he’d wanted. Plus, his attention continues to be divided between work for id Software, where he does the bulk of his video game work, and Armadillo.

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

For now, Carmack said he’ll leave private space work to other companies, including Virgin Galactic, Copenhagen Suborbitals, and SpaceX, which he called a “huge success.”

“It's not that anything was fundamentally more challenging [than it had been before],” he added. “I kind of expected us to have crashed six vehicles. We had always been making two vehicles and stepping up the pace. The real problem is that it's deceptively simple. All this stuff can be drawn out on a napkin but everything has to work right and there's not that many examples of small reusable stuff. You have to hit every single pothole in the road yourself and a pothole is a loss of a vehicle. [Private space research] is a worthy and grand goal but it's not straightforward and as with most enterprises. It takes a whole lot of tries before anyone succeeds.”