11 ms·
The story of Palmer / Oculus / etc is full of massive RIFTS between partners and parties I hadn't even heard about the TFT chapter but the more broadly reporte
by aresant 5y ago
The story of Palmer / Oculus / etc is full of massive RIFTS between partners and parties
I hadn't even heard about the TFT chapter but the more broadly reported one was the saga with Carmack / Palmer / Zenimax eg ->
- Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009.
- Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013.
- Carmack was enthralled with VR.
- Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try.
- Carmack tinkered with the Rift, adding sensors, building calibration, etc. while on the clock / using hardware from zenimax.
- Carmack brought a prototype of the Rift working on Doom 3 to E3 with him providing Oculus with their early press.
- Zenimax realized the extent to which Carmack was enabling Oculus and worked to negotiate equity with Brendan Iribe.
- Oculus sent Zenimax a proposal to discuss a partnership Sept 21, 2012 but never followed up / followed through.
- Carmack quit Zenimax the day his contract was up in June 2013, joined Oculus as CTO a few months later and took his 5 best guys with him.
- FB bought Oculus March 2014, Zenmix got pissed and sued.
From my memory of the early rift I am positive that outside of Palmer it was Carmack's genius that made this viable and Carmack's video lent credibility to the campaign.
No major comment here just a wild history, not unusual for breakthrough & derivative technology!
(1) https://www.scribd.com/document/274211118/Judge-denies-Facebook-motion https://www.scribd.com/document/274211118/Judge-denies-Faceb...
(2) http://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-raised-105-million-to-buy-id/1100-6213068/ http://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-raised-105-million-...
- RealityVoid 5y agoHonestly, Zenimax sound like really unpleasant to work for
- BoysenberryPi 5y agoEverything I know about Zenimax leads me to believe they are the absolute worst.
- MikusR 5y agoZenimax was owned and operated entirely by m̶i̶c̶e̶, i mean lawyers.
- wsc981 5y agoSo they’re kinda like the Oracle of gaming :)
- ineedasername 5y agoYeah, but Oracle is much better at it. If Zenimax really wants to compete with them, they need to be sending license auditors into my house to count the number of occupants as potential users and send me a bill for their use of &/or gaining of enjoyment through watching me play their games.
- Centigonal 5y agoEveryone I know who works at Oracle seems to love it there. IME it's the people on the other end of the contract who tend to despise Oracle.
- kilbuz 5y agoIf they didn't love it there, wouldn't they leave? In this market, it's relatively easy to do so.
- digitalsushi 5y agoseems
- Croftengea 5y agoWork conditions and business practices aren’t the same things.
- jpgvm 5y agoYeah this is a curious dichotomy. Universally hated from the outside but beloved from the inside. It does seem perhaps a little cult like though, the median tenure seems incredibly long - people join and _never_ leave.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- amelius 5y agoName sounds like some prescription drug.
- xenihn 5y agoGreat writeup, I didn't know Carmack was involved to this extant. My opinion on this, completely irrespective of the actual terms and laws: Zenimax doesn't deserve anything. But anyone who funded the original Kickstarter does (I was not one of those people). Anyone who put $200+ into that Kickstarter deserved some sort of payout. I feel like, at the very least, they should get free Oculus headsets for life. It's hard to put a number on the total value created by that initial Kickstarter funding if it had been treated as an actual investment, but I'd be willing to bet that it's already in the billions, and will only grow.
- GauntletWizard 5y agoI mean, I got both the Dev Kit promised to me and they sent me a free production Oculus Rift when it launched, so I don't feel too cheated - But still disappointed by the Facebook sellout.
- aresant 5y agoWith you on this. Someday maybe a collaborative DAO or similar model replaces Kickstarter if the SEC can sort their heads out and makes this a reality.
- xsmasher 5y agoThere are platforms like Fig and Wefunder that do this sort of thing now.
- kbenson 5y ago> I feel like, at the very least, they should get free Oculus headsets for life. Is there something different about this kickstarter than most others? Did they offer ownership? Because it sounds like you think you bought something they don't think they sold. Just because you compliment my son on his lemonade stand and tell him you believe in him and buy a lemonade doesn't entitle you to a share of his eventual billion dollar lemonade empire.
- jessaustin 5y ago
- ericmcer 5y agoIt sucks that there are just flocks of vultures waiting to profit off anything that results from his work. Business!
- dylan604 5y agoWell, you are kind of a dolt for doing side work on company time with company equipment and expecting anything other than the company expecting ownership/equity of the results.
- staunch 5y agoThe real lesson is not to work with blood sucking lawyers. They'll look for any excuse to steal from anyone they can, and they'll use the legal system to do it.
- registeredcorn 5y agoI mean, you have a point, but at the same time, Carmack and Romero have literally been pulling these kinds of shenanigan's since John^2 were working at Softdisk. It doesn't make for the best business or legal decision, but it's certainly not a surprise to hear. It's kind of his MO. I would find it hard to believe that Zenimax was unaware of what was going on.
- dylan604 5y agoContinuing to do the same thing again and again does not make it right, nor justify the behavior. Stop doing it. Your life becomes much easier. If you don't have self-discipline, then consequences happen. Yeah, it sucks, but dems da breakz. Also, you are not always in control of who your corporate overlords will be. They can be decent, then sell, then new owners are not cool. Happens all the time.
- oarsinsync 5y agoReading this strongly reminds me of the book The Fountainhead, where those who refuse to follow the same playbooks as the majority, are the ones who not only are responsible for helping to drive their respective industries forward, but are persecuted for it. I think it’s fair to call John Carmack a visionary who has moved his industry forward multiple times. I think while some investors and business owners did not benefit (as much as they could have) from his work, the rest of the gaming world absolutely did.
- LegitShady 5y agoAdd to this that most of CV1 architecture was lifted directly from the Valve Steam Sight headset - not sure how much of that went into rift. The valve employees who argued that valve should give the technology to Palmer without license (before any whispers of facebook acquisition) then jumped ship to facebook's oculus. Shady as fuck. See details in this comment here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871907 Oculus is a company that started shady and just gets shadier. They have a cheap good product but I won't support them. That doesn't even get into purchasing third party exclusives during their launch to keep them away from the competition, something that wasn't really a thing on PC at that point.
- jimrandomh 5y agoIf this were true, there would be a lot more similarity between the CV1 and the Vive. From my medium-depth technical understanding, they seem about as dissimilar as it's possible to be while still both being PC-connected VR headsets and both being compatible with the same third party Unity/UnrealEngine games.
- nimazeighami 5y agoThey’re both nearly identical in the ways that matter except for their outward appearance and minor things like audio, accessory ports, and the Vive’s camera. They both have the exact same resolution OLED displays with a butterfly mechanism to adjust the IPD and fresnel lenses. They both use IMU’s as the primary tracking system with external components used for drift correction. They both use optical tracking (except Vive is inside-out and Rift is outside-in.) They both have incredibly similar software, with a very minor tweak needed to fully translate all the Rift calls to work completely on Vive. The original Rift and Vive are very, very similar headsets. The most different thing about them is their controllers.
- LegitShady 5y agoaccording to Yates the optical tracking and fresnel lenses were the only things Oculus changed from the Steam Sight to the CV1. The rest of the actual architecture was the same. The question will be what changed from the CV1 to the Rift, but I don't think valve is going to sue oculus either way. This is just to expand the understanding of how slimy a company oculus was even before it was acquired by facebook.
- leoc 5y agoAnd this possibly wasn't the beginning of tensions at ID/Zenimax about Carmack splitting his time with outside or non-core activities. Before VR there was Armadillo Aerospace and his pre-iPhone interest in mobile games. Carmack claimed that he tried to maintain some level of involvement with ID after quitting as a full-time(ish) employee, but that this was refused. Beyond even that, the spat may have been partly a continuation of ID office-political strife that stretched back to the Quake (1) era. Then there's a whole other tangled story involving Michael Abrash and his comitatus at Valve, Palmer and the original Oculus guys, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, other teams at Valve that also got excited about VR or AR at different stages, and Valve's office politics and internal decision-making. EDIT: watered down some adverbs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 83457 5y agoI consider the videos of Carmack demoing the rift duct tape edition with Doom 3 as the start of modern VR.
- Arrath 5y agoI had no idea (the modern iteration) went back that far, to be honest. Interesting stuff.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- taneq 5y ago> From my memory of the early rift I am positive that outside of Palmer it was Carmack's genius that made this viable and Carmack's video lent credibility to the campaign. I'm positive of this. Palmer spotted an opportunity to use phone screens + MEMS sensors for cheap VR and garnered public support for his prototype by presenting it as an open source gadget. Carmack thought it was cool, and brought his name, time, resources, business acumen and legendary development skills, got it running Doom 3. Next thing you know they have a million dollar Kickstarter and are pulling in massive rounds of funding.
- ineedasername 5y agoSeems like both were necessary. Palmer had an idea and made a prototype, Carmack came in and helped spearhead the execution into a business. Isn't that a fairly standard way that startups get started?
- taneq 5y agoWell yeah, isn't that what the GP was saying? Palmer had the initial idea and cobbled together a very basic proof-of-concept, Carmack then did the heavy lifting.
- cma 5y agoCarmack was already doing the MEMS sensor stuff a bit before, attaching it to a Sony HMZ and using gyro code from his rocket company.
- badsectoracula 5y agoThe thing that always had me shaking my head in that saga is that Carmack tried to get Zenimax work on VR but Zenimax had no interest before Facebook entered the picture.
- vkou 5y agoInvestors care very deeply about social proof. And there's no better social proof than another big investor putting money into an idea.
- whoisburbansky 5y agoThen again, if Carmack being interested in something so strongly isn’t social proof enough, maybe you just aren’t very good at being an investor in this particular field.
- jpgvm 5y agoHe was right place right time almost always even if he didn't succeed. Armadillo Aerospace could have been SpaceX in a different timeline. Was clearly on the money with VR. It's hard to feel bad for Zenimax here, they had opportunities and generational talents and wasted them.
- at-fates-hands 5y agoNot only did they not have any interest, they didn't seem to balk when Carmack left ASAP when his contract was up and joined Oculus. The fact they sued once they found out FB was involved, just makes it seem like they suddenly realized what Carmack was working on and could've delivered for them, and now that big money was involved, they panicked and had to slow the company down somehow. I'd love to know what the actual timeframe is from the time Carmack left to the time Zenimax sued. It just seems so suspect the timetable and reeks of desperation of a company who discovered too late what they had all along and let go for nothing.
- johnisgood 5y agoSo, where is Carmack now?
- ErneX 5y agoHe's working on artificial general intelligence. But still does consulting for FB.