back to article Carmack blows 'crazy money' on hibernating Armadillo

Doom creator turned space cowboy John Carmack has put his rocketry startup into "hibernation mode" after exhausting his personal funds, choosing a happy marriage over another cash infusion. The founder said in a speech at Quakecon on Thursday that after plugging a little over a million dollars a year into the company for a …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How 'bout...

    "I basically expended my crazy money on Armadillo so I don't expect to see any rockets in the near future unless we wind up raising some investment money."

    Need some money? How about, oh I don't know, maybe... putting out a decent video game? Is that possible, maybe?

    1. asdf

      Re: How 'bout...

      >maybe... putting out a decent video game?

      Hey at least unlike Romero he doesn't have that POS that was Daikatana as part of his legacy.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Re: How 'bout...

        I spent real money Daikatana when I was a student, partly because of the Romero name, partly because it ran on NT 4.0. Silly me. I gave up after the second chapter, obviously my time spent playing Goldeneye on the N64 had taught me nothing about the idiocy of non-player allies.

        At least Carmack tried something different with Rage, and didn't just use some off-the-shelf game engine - even though reviews suggest it didn't live up to its promise.

        1. Irongut

          Re: How 'bout...

          I really liked Rage. The engine does have a few issues, but it was new and v1.0 always has bugs. With decent hardware to run it on it looked great. The game itself was a bit linear but it was fun and I liked their take on post apocalyptic.

  2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    IT Angle

    Too bad

    I've always enjoyed John's presentations and I suspect he did a lot for getting Linux in shape to do real time control. And for those thinking John's other half has not been too supportive she did buy him a 5-axis machining centre for his birthday. :) .

    IT Angle is Armadillo used the same core code for both their control systems and their vehicle simulations (through a viewing module) so how you though it would fly would be how it would fly.

    I hope the blog notes and teeshirts will still be available through the web site. They make fascinating reading for anyone looking to learn what happens when people do rocket engineering, not talk about it. Armadillos are rather cute (like a sort of passive aggressive hedgehog)

    Perhaps they should have hit up Top Gear for funding for The Stieg after all?

    I'll hope he and the team re-fund and re-group and return to the challenge.

    1. anoncow

      Re: Too bad

      I would prefer that John unload whatever assets Armadillo has and advance the state of the art of rendering once again. Preferably with an open world goal this time. Oh, and admit that OpenGL won the platform war in the end, and get back into the loop advancing it.

  3. Zmodem

    some lucky person will be winning a ford focus at next years quakecon

  4. NomNomNom

    The problem with John Carmack is he learned nothing from quake

    If you want to go up you don't fire the rockets into the sky you fire them into the ground and press jump

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe he needs to do another Doom collectors edition box set to make some more money!

  6. saundby

    It's too bad his team went with the NASA/Boeing approach of trying to shave grams by spending multiples of the prior cost of materials. The way they started, I was hoping they'd latch on to the Truax approach. Maybe a time with no money will help them rethink things.

    Nothing so impressed me as having access to the Sea Dragon materials while I was at Aerojet. I went through them using modern analysis tools and methods, and it still looks like the thing would work as advertised, though some facilities costs would likely be higher than originally envisioned. But the darn thing is made out of steel, not even aluminum or composites, and the engines are pressure-fed. Thinking about it has always helped keep me from chasing new materials or processes too far down the costs rabbit hole.

  7. annodomini2

    "The difference between the fortunes of Armadillo Aerospace and SpaceX might come down to Musk's messianic quest to "die on Mars," Carmack indicated"

    Or more likely that he's had much more investment and he aimed for orbital rather than sub-orbital.

    And achieved his goals.

    Sounds to me more like you lost interest.

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