Didn't Adrian Carmack (the art guy; no relation) get something like 10x more equity in the company than Carmack and Romero b/c of how badly they botched their cap table?

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efficax 2 hours ago | parent [-]

he had a 41% stake which led to some legal conflict https://www.eurogamer.net/news280905carmacksues

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ibejoeb 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Wow. Can anyone recommend a good write-up on that history?

41%... I suppose these were non-voting shares. Imagine owning nearly half the company and being denied access to company documents.

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YesBox 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

IIRC, when the company was formed, everyone got an equal split. They may have issued more shares when some other key people joined. But, when someone quit or was fired, they had to forfeit all shares (got paid out based on the companies revenue over the last year).

Eventually a bunch of people left and I think only two founders remained (Carmack and Carmack).

Since the stakes were reabsorbed, it makes sense why he ended up with 41%.

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LarsDu88 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

John Carmack slaved away writing super optimized ground breaking realtime 3d game engine code that created a multibillion dollar industry.

Adrian Carmack mostly took photographs of clay scultures (and in some cases actual plastic toys, in the case of the chainsaw and pistol used in the original Doom), and digitized them in Corel. Something any half-way decent art student could do (not to discount the iconic visual style of Commander Keen and Doom!)

It was Adrian who walked away with 41% of the >100 million dollars company!

	▲	bdamm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Which just goes to show that technical chops and business chops are entirely unrelated. I think John Carmack did alright anyway.