He is definitely on a different level. He is like a superstar athlete at the top of his game. I expect Rage to be a hit because of the passion that John Carmack is investing in it.
While one could certainly argue that id's games haven't changed much over the years in terms of macro gameplay elements (running & shooting), I think Carmack and his cohorts at id are vastly underrated when it comes to micro gameplay design... the art of just making a game feel fun to play.
Sure, you're just running and gunning down a horde of aliens/demons in all of id's games, but doing it is a LOT more fun than in most other games in the genre. A lot of this is actually due to gameplay-via-code and thus attributable pretty directly to Carmack. Turning feels right, movement feels right (not realistic -- right, there's a difference), shooting feels right, jumping feels right. It is amazingly hard to get these micro-gameplay elements to truly feel "right", and few manage to do it as consistently as id has (some other notables here include Nintendo and Bungie).
