John Carmack to get this year's BAFTA Fellowship award

Legendary and maybe part-machine programmer John Carmack will receive this year's BAFTA Fellowship award, joining the likes of Gabe Newell, Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright and many others. He'll receive the award at the BAFTA Games Awards 7th April in London - an event happening alongside EGX Rezzed.

Carmack co-founded id Software and was instrumental in the creation of Doom and Quake and Wolfenstein - games that defined an industry - and was the architect of the engines that powered them. It was the Quake 2 engine, with its out-of-the-box hardware-accelerated graphics support, that really kickstarted the whole graphics card arms race. Anyone own a Voodoo2?

Carmack was also instrumental in the rise of virtual reality. He struck up a relationship with some bloke called Palmer Lucky that led to that E3 2012 VR demonstration of Doom 3 BFG Edition running on a prototype headset that turned out to be an early Oculus Rift. The rest is history.

Today Carmack works full-time with Oculus VR as chief technology officer, having departed his decades-old role at id Software in 2013.

Frankly, it's a surprise he hasn't been awarded a Fellowship before.

So that's John Carmack, who's not to be confused with really-quite-nice chocolate bar Caramac, and a man whose tweets I'll never understand.

You have less depth perception off to the side, but not above and below, due to the shortening of the eye baseline orthogonal to the object.

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 20, 2016

Obviously.

Every time I momentarily lose my mouse cursor on my dual monitor desktop, I am reminded of the potential benefits of foveated rendering.

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 18, 2016

I know - like, I've been saying this for years!

I wish old console dev environments could go fully open. Would be interesting to see what niches could still flourish on previous gens.

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 2, 2016

This one, though: wouldn't it be great if it came true?