- 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.
- American McGee
American James McGee (born December 13 1972) is an American game designer.
- 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"
- Matt Harding
Matthew "Matt (Mathias)" Harding (born September 27, 1976) is an American video game developer and Internet celebrity known as Dancing Matt for his viral videos that show him dancing in front of landmarks and street scenes in various international locations. Harding has since achieved notoriety through widespread coverage of his travel exploits in major print and broadcast media outlets.
- 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.
- 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".
- Tim Schafer
Tim Schafer (born July 26, 1967) is an American computer game designer of Norwegian descent. He founded Double Fine Productions in January 2000, having spent over a decade at LucasArts. Most recently, Schafer designed a game for the Xbox, PS2, and PC called "Psychonauts". Schafer is best known in the video game industry for his story-telling and comedy writing abilities.
- Jonathan Blow
Jonathan Blow is a programmer and designer who works primarily on advanced and experimental video games. His game "Braid" is a meditation on loss and relationships where the player controls time to solve puzzles. Braid won the "Game Design" award at the Independent Games Festival in 2006. For many years he wrote the Inner Product column for Game Developer Magazine.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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".
- 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.
- John Carmack
John D. Carmack II (born August 20 1970) is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. A prolific American programmer, Carmack co-founded id Software, a computer game development company, in 1991. Carmack was the lead programmer of the highly successful id computer games "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D", "Doom", "Quake", and subsequent sequels to "Doom" and "Quake".
- 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.
- David Mullich
David: I was just about to accept a job offer from a large game publisher when I noticed a game producer want ad in the Los Angeles Times, from a small company called ISG. I decided to check them out, and learned that they wanted to develop games for CD-I. I was somewhat familiar with the platform, having been invited to demonstrations at PIMA when I worked at Disney, but wasn't very impressed with it as a game machine.
- Harvey Smith
Harvey Smith is a video game designer interested in deeply simulated, immersive environments. His work merges elements from RPGs and first-person shooters in the creation of games with strong fictional integrity that lends themselves to self-paced exploration and player self-expression. Throughout his career, he has had various roles on projects such as Wing Commander 3DO, Ultima VIII: Pagan, CyberMage, Technosaur (cancelled), System Shock, FireTeam, Deus Ex, …
- Eugene Jarvis
Eugene Peyton Jarvis (born 1955) is a game designer and programmer, producing pinball machines for Atari and video games for Williams Electronics. Most notable amongst his works are the seminal arcade video games "Defender" and "Robotron: 2084" in the early 1980s, and the "Cruis'n" series of driving games for Midway Games in the 1990s. He co-founded Vid Kidz in the early 1980s and currently leads his own development studio, Raw Thrills Inc.
- 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, …
- 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.
- 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.
- Scott Miller
Scott Miller is an entrepreneur and former game programmer. Miller is the founder and CEO of Apogee Software, Ltd. (currently known as 3D Realms Entertainment), started in 1987. He started as game programmer, but now handles primary business duties of the company, as well as producing and co-designing all third-party games associated with the company, including "Wolfenstein 3D", "Raptor", "Terminal Velocity", "Max Payne" and "Prey".
- 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", …
- Seamus Blackley
Seamus Blackley is an agent with Creative Artists Agency representing video game creators. After entering Tufts University to study jazz piano, Blackley switched to study physics and graduated Summa cum Honore en Tesis. As a sophomore, he published his first paper in the "Journal of Magnetic Resonance". After college, he studied High Energy Physics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, until the Superconducting Supercollider project was cancelled in 1993.
- Shinji Mikami
is a Japanese video game designer at Capcom best known for creating the "Resident Evil" survival horror series (known as "Biohazard" in Japan), and has also contributed in the creation of some of Capcom's most popular post-32-bit franchises, including "Viewtiful Joe" and "Devil May Cry" as a producer.
- Richard Bartle
Richard Allan Bartle (born January 10, 1960, in England) is a British writer and game researcher, best known for being the co-author of MUD, the first multi-user dungeon. He is one of the pioneers of the massively multiplayer online game industry. Bartle received a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Essex, which is where he created MUD along with Roy Trubshaw, in 1978.
- Richard Rouse III
Richard Rouse III is an American video game designer and writer best known as the designer of "The Suffering" games and the author of "Game Design: Theory & Practice". Rouse started out as a writer at Macintosh gaming magazines like "Inside Mac Games" and "Mac Games Digest" while attending the University of Chicago. This eventually led to the creation of his own company, Paranoid Productions, which produced two Macintosh games, …
- Scott Adams
Scott Adams (born July 10, 1952) is the co-founder, with wife Alexis, of Adventure International, an early publisher of games for home computers. Born in Miami, Florida, Adams was the first person known to create an adventure-style game for personal computers, in 1978 (on a 16KB Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, written in the BASIC programming language). These early text adventure games use a minimal parser, recognizing 2-word commands of the form VERB NOUN.
- David Perry
David Perry (born 1967) is a Northern Irish game developer who has created dozens of computer games, the best known of which include "Earthworm Jim", "MDK", "Messiah", Wild 9 and "Enter the Matrix". He also founded Shiny Entertainment, where he worked from 1993-2006. The company created games for many internationally-known brands and companies, including Disney, 7 Up, McDonald's, Orion Pictures, and Warner Bros.
- Michel Ancel
Michel Ancel is a celebrated French game designer for Ubisoft known for creating "Rayman" and "Beyond Good & Evil".
- 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.
- Mark Jacobs
Mark Jacobs is currently the GM/VP of EA Mythic. He was the co-founder (along with Rob Denton) and President and CEO of Mythic Entertainment, Inc.. He is one of the pioneers in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game industry, having created two early MUDs, "Aradath" and Dragon's Gate serving as both the designer and programmer in addition to his duties as President/CEO.
- David Crane
David Crane (born in Nappanee, Indiana) is a video game designer and programmer. Crane started his programming career at Atari, making games for the Atari 2600. After meeting up with co-worker Alan Miller in a tennis game, Miller discussed with him a plan he had to leave and found a company that would give game designers more recognition. From this meeting, he left Atari in 1979 and co-founded Activision, along with Miller, Jim Levy, Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan.
- Randy Farmer
F. Randall "Randy" Farmer has organized online communities. He is probably most famous for his role creating one of the first graphical online MMOG, Lucasfilm's "Habitat", with Chip Morningstar.
- Daniel James
Daniel James (b. 1971, London), is a British-Canadian game developer based in San Francisco. He is a co-founder and CEO of Three Rings Design, the company behind the MMORPGs "Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates" and "Bang! Howdy".
- 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.
- Brian Green
Brian "Psychochild" Green is a game developer currently working on the online 3D graphical RPG, Meridian 59. He had worked on the game for 3DO, but co-founded Near Death Studios in 2001. He also is a frequent gaming conference speaker and writes for a number of game design websites, including GamersInfo.net. Meridian 59 was originally released in 1996 by the 3DO company and was one of the first commercial online games available for sale in retail stores in the US.
- Paul Barnett
Paul Barnett (Born January 15, 1970) is an English game designer most often associated with the Games Workshop Warhammer universe. He is currently Creative Director for EA Mythic, overseeing the design of the MMORPG Warhammer Online. Prior to this Barnett worked on several pioneering European MUDs including Legends of Terris and its successor Legends of Cosrin before creating the fantasy realm of the Kingdom of Heroes.
- 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.
- Mark Cerny
Mark Cerny (born 1964) is a video game industry figure having worked as a game designer, programmer, producer and business executive. As president of Cerny Games, which he founded in 1998, he now acts as a consultant in the video game industry. Cerny, a fan of computer programming and arcade games, started in the game industry at the age of 17 when he joined Atari in 1982. In those earlier days of professional game development, …