- 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". - 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. - 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. - 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. - Andre Lamothe
André LaMothe is a Computer Scientist, well-known game programming author and software developer. He is best known for his books written on game programming, and has written numerous computer games for 8-bit computers as well as the "3D Rex-Blade" series in the mid '90s. He also developed one of the first super computer virtual reality location-based games while working at Vision of Reality. - Tim Sweeney
Tim Sweeney is a computer game programmer and the founder of Epic Games, previously known as Epic MegaGames. He established Epic as a shareware company while he was a student majoring in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. Sweeney revealed that he had been interested in game development and computer programming since he was 10 years old. Tim finally started to make games, right out of his parents' basement where he lived. - 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. - Jeff Bridges
Jeffrey Leon Bridges (born December 4, 1949) is an Academy Award-nominated American actor. - Ken Silverman
Ken Silverman (born November 1 1975) is a game programmer, best known for writing the Build engine used in "Duke Nukem 3D", "Shadow Warrior", "Blood", and more than a dozen other games in the mid- to late-1990s. Once considered the primary rival of John Carmack, Ken started work on the Build engine sometime before his first semester at Brown University in 1993, under a contract with Apogee Software. - 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. - Michael Abrash
Michael Abrash is a highly regarded technical writer, and one of the top optimization and 80x86 assembly language programmers, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book "Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge." Unfortunately, the original 8086 processor, the focus of the book, was several generations behind the state of the art by the time the book was published. The much anticipated second volume was never published, … - Eric Lengyel
Eric Lengyel is a computer game engine developer with experience in areas including 3D graphics, animation, audio, and networking. He is the author of the textbook "Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics" (Charles River Media, 2002). Lengyel is also a member of the editorial board for the "Journal of Graphics Tools" and a contributor to the "Game Programming Gems" series. - 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". - Johan Andersson
Johan Andersson (born August 28, 1974) is the lead game programmer for Paradox Interactive, the Swedish-based game company which created the award-winning "Europa Universalis" series, "Victoria", "Crusader Kings", and the "Hearts of Iron" series. He has gained something of a cult status among the fans of Paradox Interactive's games, due partly to his skill in creating games and partly to the company's patching policy. - Bill Budge
Bill Budge (born c. 1954) is a computer game programmer and designer. His two main claims to fame are 1981's "Raster Blaster" and 1983's "Pinball Construction Set". Both these games were released originally for the Apple II. Budge says he became interested in computers while obtaining a PhD at UC Berkeley. He purchased an Apple II and began writing games. He enjoyed it so much that he dropped out of school and became a game programmer. - 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. - 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. - 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. - Steve Russell
Steve "Slug" Russell is a programmer and computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, one of the earliest videogames, in 1961 with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT working on a DEC Digital PDP-1. While there is some debate over priority regarding the concept of computer-based games in general, Spacewar! was unquestionably the first to gain widespread recognition, and is generally recognized as the first of the "shoot-'em' up" genre. - 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. - Ryan Gordon
Ryan Gordon (also known as Icculus) is a former Loki Software employee, now responsible for Icculus.org, which hosts many Loki Software projects, as well as hosts new projects started by himself which include, a port of Duke Nukem 3D, a port of Shadow Warrior, an enhanced port of Quake III Arena (ioquake3), and many other projects for Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows. - David Braben
David Braben is a British computer programmer, best known for co-writing "Elite", a hugely popular and influential space trading computer game, in the early 1980s. "Elite" was written in conjunction with Ian Bell while both were undergraduate students at Cambridge University. Another seminal game written by Braben was "Zarch" for the Acorn Archimedes (later released on some other platforms as Virus), … - 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", … - Al Lowe
Al Lowe, born July 24 1942, is a musician and game designer of Sierra On-Line mostly known for the creation of the "Leisure Suit Larry" series. - Don Daglow
Don Daglow (born circa 1953) is an American computer game and video game designer, programmer and producer. He is best known for designing a series of pioneering simulation games and role-playing games, as well as the first computer baseball game and the first graphical MMORPG, all between 1971 and 1995. He founded long-standing game developer Stormfront Studios in 1988; as of 2006 more than 10,000,000 Stormfront games had been sold. - Howard Scott Warshaw
Howard Scott Warshaw is a former game designer who worked for Atari in the early 1980s, where he designed and programmed the games "Yars' Revenge", "Raiders of the Lost Ark", and the infamous flop, "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial". He has also written two books as well as producing and directing three documentaries. Warshaw's first success, "Yars' Revenge", first started as an Atari 2600 adaptation of the arcade game "Star Castle". - Silas Warner
Silas Warner (18 August 1949 - 3 March 2004) was a game programmer and the first employee of Muse Software. Among other games, he created "Castle Wolfenstein" and "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein". These two games inspired id Software to create "Wolfenstein 3D", the game that popularized the first-person shooter genre. Warner was educated at Deep Springs College and Indiana University. He was a talented programmer, but lacked some social skills. - Chris Sawyer
"Chris Sawyer" is a Scottish computer game developer who is best-known for designing and programming "RollerCoaster Tycoon", "RollerCoaster Tycoon 2", and "Transport Tycoon". He entered the games industry in 1983, writing games in Z80 machine code on the Memotech MTX home computer, and then the Amstrad CPC series home computer. Some of these were published by Ariolasoft, "Sepulcri Scelerati" and "Ziggurat". - Alan Miller
Alan Miller is a pioneering and influential figure in the video game industry. He was an early game designer and programmer for Atari 2600 games who went on to found two large video game developers and publishers. Miller joined Atari in February 1977 and was one of the first four Atari 2600 game designers. His 2600 titles include "Surround", "Hunt & Score", "Hangman" and "Basketball". - Ken Williams
Ken Williams (born October 1954) is an American game programmer and co-founder with his wife Roberta Williams of On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra On-Line. Roberta and Ken married at the age of 19 and have two children. The couple have been leading figures in the development of graphical adventure games. Their contribution to gaming was partially chronicled in the book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution". - Matthew Smith
Matthew Smith (born 1966) is a British computer game programmer. He is best known for his games "Manic Miner" and "Jet Set Willy" for the ZX Spectrum, released in 1983 and 1984 respectively. He was born in London, but his family moved around a great deal, finally ending up in Wallasey. He started out programming on a TRS-80. His first commercial game was a "Galaxian" clone for the TRS-80 called "Delta Tower One". - 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. - Soren Johnson
Soren Johnson, employed by Firaxis Games in 2000, co-designed, with Jeff Briggs, and helped in programming the popular video game "Civilization III", also writing the entire Artificial Intelligence code for the game. He was also the lead designer of "Civilization IV", once again writing all of the A.I. Prior to his work at Firaxis, he acquired a BA in history and a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University. - 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. - Ed Boon
Edward J. Boon (born March 30 1964 in Chicago, Illinois) is a video game programmer. Boon, along with John Tobias is a co-creator of the "Mortal Kombat" fighting game series. He continues to work on the ongoing series of games, movies and TV shows. Boon is generally credited as the lead programmer while Tobias is lead designer. He has also provided voice acting and motion capture for the games. - Dave Grossman
Dave Grossman is a noted game programmer and game designer, most known for his early work at LucasArts. He has also written several children's books. - Bob Smith
Bob Smith is a game programmer and one of the founders of Imagic, who wrote several notable titles for the Atari 2600. His best known work is probably 1982's "Dragonfire", although he also wrote "Video Pinball" and "Riddle of the Sphinx". He continued working on games through the 1980s and 1990s for a variety of companies, and is now retired in Oregon. - Danielle Bunten Berry
Danielle Bunten Berry (February 19, 1949 - July 3, 1998), also known as Dani Bunten (born Daniel Paul Bunten), was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game "M.U.L.E." (one of the first successful multiplayer games), and 1984's "The Seven Cities of Gold". Bunten was a transsexual woman, having undergone sex reassignment surgery in November 1992. - Anne Westfall
Anne Westfall is an influential game programmer of the 1980s. She is the wife of fellow game programmer, game designer and entrepreneur Jon Freeman. - Jon Freeman
Jon Freeman was an influential computer game industry figure of the 1980s and early 1990s. He was a co-founder of Epyx and Free Fall Associates and the spouse of game programmer, Anne Westfall. Besides founding these two companies, though he is credited with some programming, Freeman is most noted as an influential game designer.
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