At 14, John Carmack used a homemade mix of thermite and Vaseline to melt through a school window to steal Apple II computers, and served a year in juvenile detention. This episode traces how that relentless drive carried him from Softdisk and Commander Keen to co-founding id Software, where his adaptive tile refresh, ray casting, binary space partitioning, and surface caching techniques built the technical foundation of 3D gaming.

We examine the cognitive style behind the code: 60-hour weeks, solitary hotel room programming retreats, the same Domino's pizza order for over 15 years, and the when it's done release philosophy he later partly recanted after the traumatic Quake crunch. We also cover his open-source ethos, the Oculus and ZeniMax legal battle, his blunt departure memo from Meta, Armadillo Aerospace's NASA Lunar Lander Challenge wi ...