- Will Wright
Will Wright (born January 20, 1960) is an American computer game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis. He is best known as the original designer of computer games such as "SimCity", "The Sims" and "Spore" - Shigeru Miyamoto
is a Japanese video game designer. He is the creator of the "Mario", "Donkey Kong", "The Legend of Zelda", "Star Fox", "Nintendogs", "Wave Race", and "Pikmin" video game series for Nintendo game systems. He is one of the world's most celebrated game designers, and is often called the father of modern video gaming. - Sid Meier
Sidney K. Meier (born 1954 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American programmer and designer of some of the most commercially and critically successful computer strategy games of all time. Meier has won several accolades for both his contributions to the computer games industry and for the titles that have gained huge commercial successes. Meier is considered by many as one of the most important figures in the computer games industry. - Raph Koster
Raphael "Raph" Koster (7 September 1971-) is an American entrepreneur, game designer, and author of "A Theory of Fun for Game Design". Koster is widely recognized for his work as the lead designer of "Ultima Online" and the creative director behind "Star Wars Galaxies". Since July 2006, he has been working as the founder and president of Areae on an unannounced product. - Greg Costikyan
Greg Costikyan, also known as Designer X, is an American game designer and science fiction writer. Costikyan's career spans nearly all extant genres of gaming, including hex-based wargames, role-playing games, boardgames, card games, computer games, online games and mobile games. Several of his games have won Origins Awards. - Chris Bateman
Chris Bateman is a game designer and writer who is best known for his work on the games "Discworld Noir" and "Ghost Master". Founder and director of game design and narrative consultancy company International Hobo. He is also the author of two science fiction novels; co-author of "21st Century Game Design", published in 2005, … - Ron Gilbert
Ron Gilbert is an American computer game designer, programmer, and producer, best known for his work on several classic LucasArts adventure games, including "Maniac Mansion" and the first two "Monkey Island" games. Gilbert was also co-founder of Humongous Entertainment and its sister company Cavedog Entertainment. His games are generally focused on interactive storytelling. - Hideo Kojima
is a Japanese video game designer at Konami. Formerly the vice president of Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, he is currently the head of Kojima Productions, a new team devoted to creative game development leaving behind all the business and administrative decision making. He is the creator and director of a number of successful games, including the "Metal Gear series", "Snatcher", and "Policenauts". - American McGee
American James McGee (born December 13 1972) is an American game designer. - Peter Molyneux
Peter Molyneux OBE (born 5 May 1959 in Guildford, Surrey, UK) is a computer game designer and game programmer, responsible for well known "God games" "Populous" and "Black & White", among others, as well as "Business Strategy" games such as "Theme Park" and most recently, "The Movies". In August 1997 Peter left Bullfrog Productions to establish a new development team, Lionhead Studios. - Richard Garriott
Richard Allen Garriott (born July 4, 1961; nickname Lord British and General British) is a significant figure in the video game industry. He was originally a game designer and programmer, but now engages in various aspects of computer game development. - Warren Spector
Warren Spector is a veteran computer game designer. He is known for having worked to merge elements of role-playing games and first-person shooters. He currently resides in Austin, Texas with his wife, fantasy writer Caroline Skelley. - Ryan Shwayder
Ryan Shwayder, commonly known by his pseudonym Blackguard, is a popular online game designer who is known both for his work on massively multiplayer games as well as his writings on the subject of game development. He currently works for the Curt Schilling-lead game company in Massachusetts known as 38 Studios, alongside author R.A. Salvatore and artist Todd McFarlane. - Chris Crawford
Chris Crawford is a noted computer game designer and writer, responsible for a number of important games in the 1980s, for founding "The Journal of Computer Game Design" and for organizing the Computer Game Developers' Conference. After receiving a B.S. in physics from UC Davis in 1972 and an M.S. in the same from University of Missouri - Columbia in 1975, Crawford taught at a community college and the University of California, … - Steve Jackson
Steve Jackson (born 1951 in Manchester, England) is a games reviewer and writer. He is one of the best known authors in the gaming industry. In 1975, he founded the company Games Workshop with Ian Livingstone, and the two created the line of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks published by Penguin Books. Jackson now works at Lionhead Studios, which he founded with Peter Molyneux. He is also an honorary lecturer at Brunel University in London, … - Steve Jackson
Steve Jackson (born ~1953) is an American game designer. After working for many years at Metagaming designing such games as "Ogre" and "The Fantasy Trip", he left to found Steve Jackson Games (SJ Games) in the early 1980s. He designed many of the games published by SJ Games, such as "Car Wars", "GURPS", "Munchkin" and many others. - Cliff Bleszinski
Clifford Bleszinski (born February 12, 1975), also known as CliffyB, is the design director for the game development company Epic Games in Cary, North Carolina. He is most famous for his continuing hand in the development of the Unreal franchise and the Gears of War franchise. He cites Shigeru Miyamoto as his biggest influence. In 2008, Bleszinski finished the production on Gears of War 2. - David Jaffe
David Jaffe is a video game designer and currently resides in San Diego, California. He is married and has two children. Jaffe attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He applied to their prestigious film school, but was never admitted. After a few years pursuing his dream of directing movies, he turned to game design. He is best known for directing the critically-acclaimed "Twisted Metal" series and, more recently, "God of War". - Tomonobu Itagaki
Tomonobu Itagaki is a Japanese video game designer who heads Team Ninja, one of Tecmo's development teams. He is widely known for his work on the "Dead or Alive" series of video games. He has also gained notoriety for his controversial remarks about other developers and titles, specifically rival fighting game franchise "Tekken". - John Romero
John Romero is EVP of Game Development at Slipgate Ironworks, a new Bay Area MMO company he co-founded in September 2005. He was a co-Founder of Inside Out Software, Ideas From The Deep, id Software, Ion Storm, and Monkeystone Games. From his early Apple IIe games to the legendary Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, and Quake, Romero has made an indelible mark on the computer gaming industry. - Eric Zimmerman
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and the co-founder and CEO of gameLab, a computer game development company, which is known for the game "Diner Dash". Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference. He is also the co-author of 4 books including "Rules of Play" with Katie Salen, which was published in November 2004. He has taught at universities including MIT, the University of Texas at Austin, Parsons School of Design, … - Simon Carless
Simon Carless is a video game industry journalist, editor and game designer. He was born in London, England, but has since moved to San Jose, California. Simon commutes to San Francisco where he works for CMP Technology as the Editorial Director in the CMP Game Group including editing both "Game Developer Magazine" and the Webby Award winning Gamasutra. - Hironobu Sakaguchi
(born November 25, 1962) is a Japanese game designer, game director and game producer. He is famous around the world as the creator of the "Final Fantasy" series, and has had a long career in gaming with over 80 million units of video games sold worldwide. - Michel Ancel
Michel Ancel is a celebrated French game designer for Ubisoft known for creating "Rayman" and "Beyond Good & Evil". - Brenda Brathwaite
Brenda Brathwaite is a game designer and the founder and chair of the International Game Developers Sex Special Interest group. She has worked in the video game industry for over 24 years and is currently a professor of game design at Savannah College of Art and Design. She has worked on 22 published titles, including the "Wizardry" series, the "Jagged Alliance" series, "Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes" and "Playboy: The Mansion". - Tetsuya Mizuguchi
Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Japanese: 水口哲也, "Mizuguchi Tetsuya", born May 22, 1965 in Otaru, Hokkaidō, Japan) is a video game designer and founder of the video game developer firm Q Entertainment. - Ron Edwards
Ronald Edwards (born September 4, 1964) is a game designer, theorist, and an influential member of the indie role-playing game community. Notably, he is the creator of the Sorcerer RPG, the GNS Theory of gameplay, and The Big Model. Edwards is also co-founder of The Forge, an online community to support Indie RPG design and publication. He is not an uncontroversial figure; he has made allegations in the past that playing particular roleplaying games can cause brain damage, … - Bruno Faidutti
Bruno Faidutti (23 October 1961) is an historian and sociologist, living in France, who is best known as an author of board games. His best known games include Knightmare Chess (1991), Mystery of the Abbey (1993, 2003) and Citadels (2000). He is also involved in the boardgaming community with his "Ideal Games Library" website and personal "Game of the Year" prize. Many of his games are the results of collaboration with other designers. - Roberta Williams
Roberta Heuer Williams (born February 16, 1953) is a computer game designer. She is perhaps most famous for her pioneering work in graphical adventure games, particularly the popular "King's Quest" series. In the eighties and nineties, Roberta and her husband, Ken Williams, were leading figures in the development of graphical adventure games. They founded the company On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra On-Line. - Richard Garfield
Richard Channing Garfield, Jr. (born 26 June 1963 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a mathematics professor and game designer who created the card games "Magic: The Gathering", "Netrunner", "BattleTech", "Vampire: The Eternal Struggle" (originally known as "Jyhad"), "The Great Dalmuti", "Star Wars Trading Card Game", and the board game "RoboRally". - Yuji Naka
is a video game designer, programmer, the former head of Sonic Team, a group of Sega programmers/designers, the lead programmer of the original "Sonic the Hedgehog" and the head of PROPE. After graduating High school, Yuji Naka decided to skip university and stay in his hometown of Osaka. During this time, Yuji worked long hours at various menial jobs. After quiting his last job, Yuji saw that Sega was looking for programming assistants. - Dave Arneson
David L. Arneson (born September 30, 1947 in Minnesota, United States) is an American game designer. In the early 1970s, he co-created the "Dungeons & Dragons" (D&D) role-playing game with Gary Gygax. He is a University of Minnesota alumnus, and began working on role-playing games (RPGs) at Coffman Union. He has kept a relatively low profile and has been called an "unsung legend" in the early development of role-playing games. - Klaus Teuber
Klaus Teuber is a well-known German designer of board games. He has won the Spiel des Jahres award four times, for "Settlers of Catan", "Barbarossa", "Drunter und Drüber" and "Adel Verpflichtet". He retired from his profession as a dental technician to become a full-time game designer in 1999. As of 2003, he lives in Darmstadt with his wife Claudia. They have two sons, Guido and Benny - Toru Iwatani
is a former video game designer and created one of the most popular arcade games of all time, "Pac-Man". Iwatani was born in the Meguro ward of Tokyo, Japan. He joined the computer software company Namco in 1977, where he started his career in the video game business. There, he came up with the idea for a game called "Puck-Man" and in 1980, he, along with programmer Hideyuki Mokajima and three other Namco employees, finished the game. - Jeff Minter
Jeff 'Yak' Minter (born in Reading, April 22 1962) is a British computer/video game designer and programmer. He is the founder of software house Llamasoft and his most recent work is the light synthesizer (called Neon) built into the Xbox 360 console. Many of his games include certain distinctive elements-they are often arcade style shoot-em-ups. His fondness of llamas, sheep, camels etc. - Brian Reynolds
Brian Reynolds (born 1967) is a well known computer strategy game designer, formerly of MicroProse and Firaxis Games. He now runs his own game development company, Big Huge Games where he is CEO and creative director, and has been chairman of the International Game Developers Association. He has played a major part in designing a number of multi-million selling games including "Civilization II" and "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri". - Jordan Mechner
Jordan Mechner is a game programmer, game designer, and movie director. Mechner was born in New York City and graduated from Yale University in 1985. Mechner's first hit game was "Karateka" (1984), written while he was still an undergraduate. "Prince of Persia," released in 1989, was noted for its fluid animation of human figures. Both titles were published by Brøderbund. For the animations used in "Prince of Persia", … - Masahiro Sakurai
(born on August 3, 1970 in Tokyo) is a game concept designer, the creative force behind both the "Kirby" and the "Super Smash Bros." series on Nintendo platforms, and wrote a weekly column for "Famitsu" magazine. One of Sakurai's earliest experiences in the video game industry began when he worked for HAL Laboratory, Inc. It is here that he created the character "Kirby" at the age of 19. He would soon direct his first title, "Kirby's Dream Land". - Noah Falstein
Noah Falstein is a freelance game designer and producer who has been in the video game industry since 1980. He was one of the first 10 employees at Lucasfilm Games (which became LucasArts Entertainment), DreamWorks Interactive (which became EALA), and The 3DO Company (which became defunct). Currently he runs The Inspiracy and writes the "Better by Design" column for "Game Developer" magazine. - Tom Hall
Tom A. Hall (born September 2, 1964) is a game designer born in Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and there received a B.S. in Computer Science. In 1987 he worked at Softdisk Inc., where he was both a programmer and the editor of "Big Blue Disk", a software bundle delivered monthly. Along with some of his co-workers, John Romero, John Carmack, and Adrian Carmack, he founded id Software. He served as creative director and designer there, …
|
| |