John Carmack
As co-founder and lead programmer of id Software, John Carmack pioneered real-time 3D graphics on ordinary consumer PCs. His engines powered Wolfenstein 3D, Doom (1993), and Quake (1996) — games that defined the first-person shooter and popularized online multiplayer deathmatch.
He repeatedly released id's classic engines as open source, seeding a whole generation of graphics and game developers, and became known for marathon, deeply focused coding sessions and low-level optimization wizardry (such as the famous fast inverse square root trick found in the Quake III source).
In 2013 he became Chief Technology Officer of Oculus VR, helping kick-start the modern virtual-reality era, and has since turned his focus to research, including the pursuit of artificial general intelligence.