John Carmack, one of the core developers working on the original Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, and Doom titles, has announced that he's going to take part in BasedCon, a self-proclaimed "anti-woke" sci-fi convention, and people aren't happy about it. Over the years, Carmack has worked on cutting-edge technology in various niches, like VR and gaming, which led many to look up to him.
While Carmack hasn't worked with id Software in quite some time now, having left the studio in 2013 to join Oculus VR, quantifying his effects on the gaming industry at large would be difficult, if not entirely impossible. Much of the core graphics tech that allowed for large jumps in visual fidelity in the 2000s could be traced to Carmack's work, with one of the particularly notable highlights being Doom 3's then-advanced shadow rendering.
Outside of Carmack's recent departure from Meta, he hadn't been making many headlines until he announced via his Twitter account that he'd be participating in this year's BasedCon. A sci-fi convention for people "tired of woke propaganda," BasedCon promises to take a stand against venues "pushing social justice dogma." After Carmack's fans called him out on Twitter, he said that it was unfortunate that the convention organiser made it "so intentionally provocative," explaining that politics weren't a topic when he last attended the event.
Though Carmack explained that he is no "culture warrior" and that his participation in BasedCon doesn't betray any particular political leanings, his audience is still quite unhappy with the fact that he's going. The situation is fairly tangled up at this point, but it does seem unlikely that Carmack will change his mind about the anti-woke convention, considering his comments on the matter.
It is worth pointing out that the release of Doom contributed, at least in part, to the Satanic panic of the 1980s and may have been considered "woke" itself back in the day had the term been coined decades earlier. Whatever the case may be, the book Masters of Doom, which told the story of Carmack and John Romero founding id Software and influencing an entire genre, implied that Carmack has always had a bit of a libertarian outlook on the world. So it's not necessarily strange that he'd view BasedCon from a pragmatic point of view.
The other Master of Doom, Romero, hasn't shown any major right-wing leanings as of late. Romero got his Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC 2023 and he's mostly been trucking along in game development for decades, occasionally releasing a new game or bundle of Doom .wad files. One of Romero's most notable recent releases, in fact, was a Doom map which raised over 25K Euro for the Ukrainian defense against Russia.