Shigeru Miyamoto is a Japanese video game designer and producer for the video game company Nintendo, currently serving as one of its representative directors. He is best known as the creator of some of the most critically acclaimed and best-selling video games and franchises of all time, such as Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, F-Zero, Donkey Kong and Pikmin.
Markus Alexej Persson, also known as Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is best known for creating the sandbox video game Minecraft, and for founding the video game company Mojang, alongside Carl Manneh and Jakob Porser, in late 2010.
Video games, Business and economy, Science
Satoru Iwata was a Japanese video game programmer and businessman who was the fourth president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nintendo. He is widely regarded as a major contributor in broadening the appeal of video games to a wider audience by focusing on novel and entertaining games rather than top-of-the-line hardware.
Peter Douglas Molyneux is an English video game designer and programmer. He created the god games Populous, Dungeon Keeper and Black & White, as well as Theme Park, the Fable series, Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube?, and Godus. He currently works at 22Cans as the founder.
Alfonso John Romero is an American director, designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry. He is best known as a co-founder of id Software and designer for many of their games, including Wolfenstein 3D, Dangerous Dave, Hexen, Doom and Quake. His game designs and development tools, along with new programming techniques created and implemented by id Software's lead programmer John D. Carmack, led to a mass popularization of the first-person shooter, or FPS, in the 1990s. He is credited with coining the FPS multiplayer term "deathmatch".
Jens "Jeb" Bergensten is a Swedish video game designer. Since December 2010, he has worked for the video game developer Mojang as a programmer and game designer. He became the lead designer and lead developer of the indie sandbox game Minecraft, after Markus "Notch" Persson stepped down from his position in December 2011. He is known by his in-game name "jeb_".
Chris Sawyer is a Scottish video game designer and programmer who is best known for creating the Transport Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon series. He is also the founder of 31X, a mobile game development company.
Michael "Mike" Dailly is a Scottish video game designer, best known for designing the original prototype of Grand Theft Auto, and being one of the four founders of DMA Design, alongside David Jones, Russell Kay, and Steve Hammond.
Brendan Iribe is an American game programmer and the co-founder of Oculus VR, Inc.
Michael Abrash is a programmer and technical writer specializing in code optimization and 80x86 assembly language, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge and a monthly column in Dr. Dobb's Journal in the early 1990s. A later book, Zen of Graphics Programming, applied these ideas to 2D and 3D graphics prior to the advent of hardware accelerators for the PC. Though not strictly a game programmer, Abrash has worked on the underlying technology for games, such as Quake, for much of his career.
Daniel "Dan" Warner "Toasty" Forden is an American sound programmer and music composer, and was the lead programmer on several high-profile arcade and pinball games. He is best known for working on the Mortal Kombat fighting game series. He has also played bass in the band Cheer-Accident.
Soren Johnson is a video game designer and programmer. He was employed by Firaxis Games from 2000 to 2007, where he co-designed several of their most popular games. In 2013 he co-founded Mohawk Games.
Don Dailey was an American longtime researcher in computer chess and a game programmer. Along with collaborator Larry Kaufman, he was the author of the chess engine Komodo. Dailey started chess programming in the 1980s, and was the author and co-author of multiple commercial as well as academic chess programs. He has been an active poster in computer chess forums and computer Go newsgroups. He was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and served in recent years as an elder in the church of Roanoke.
Steven Polge is a game programmer, most noted for his work on Epic Games' Unreal series of games. Polge was hired by Epic in 1997 after creating the Reaper Bot, which is recognized by Guinness World Records as the first computer-controlled deathmatch opponent. In addition to programming on the franchise, he served as lead designer on Unreal Tournament 3, and has been credited on other Epic titles such as Gears of War, Shadow Complex and Infinity Blade.
William Crowther is a computer programmer and caver. He is best known as the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of game design and inspired the text adventure game genre.