Matias, when I said person can be popular, I meant company 'heroes'. These day unless they are the founder, company prefer not to have heroes, maybe a mascot, but not a heroes (face). Do not compare with entertainment industry where the person IS the product itself. With the loss of Steve Jobs, I don't think Apple will have a face/heroes anymore. But with game development, it happened long time ago. i'm sure there are awesome programmers working on UDK and CryEngine - but there will be no heroes.

Like the opening of Batman : people dies and also have flaw, and could be corrupted - but symbol does not.

Matias, when I said person can be popular, I meant company 'heroes'. These day unless they are the founder, company prefer not to have heroes, maybe a mascot, but not a heroes (face). Do not compare with entertainment industry where the person IS the product itself. With the loss of Steve Jobs, I don't think Apple will have a face/heroes anymore. But with game development, it happened long time ago. i'm sure there are awesome programmers working on UDK and CryEngine - but there will be no heroes.

Like the opening of Batman : people dies and also have flaw, and could be corrupted - but symbol does not.

You say this almost as though you think companies can't be founded post 2000. Even still I'm not sure I agree. Peter Moore is a pretty solid figurehead, and Cliffy B and Jade Raymond are both publicly successful. Its usually harder for tech people to get into the limelight because, lets face it, many of them are socially awkward and with the size of teams today the public face of a game falls on a producer/marketing; still, there are plenty of individuals that are making a name for themselves.

For some reason, I view Carmack as some type of god among men almost, I'd visit his gravestone if I ever travel to the country that happens to be in the future, so I suppose that should act as some type of disclaimer to what I'm gonna say - I'm obviously severely biased towards Carmack due to my particular strain of geekdom.

I don't think it really matters if he was born today what type of impact he would have, the fact is he existed and made the contributions he did, like all the other great historical figures.

As the “Outliers” book suggests above, while I also agree that environmental factors (upbringing, associates, struggles in early life, culture of the time-period et cetera), all enter into the picture, I'd also weigh the natural talent, predispositions, hard work and discipline of the individual equally as strongly together with that, since they all feed into each other.

Carmack must have spent many thousands of hours and solitary nights slogging away at his craft in silence. Really I'd just say that it takes all those factors in unison to create the stand-out individuals we see making such particularly unique or specific contributions to this world of billions, be it in music or anything else. I'd go so far as to say this can't really be predicted, recreated or analysed in some concrete statistical way, it's just the way it is.

So we should appreciate Carmack as an individual, forged from all those factors and not try and measure him abstractly disjointed, piece by piece.

The battle between J Carmack and Knen Silverman wAs quite intense in the 1990's.

Great Read thanks!