Markus Alexej Persson, better 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 in 2010, alongside Carl Manneh and Jakob Porser.
Shigeru Miyamoto is a Japanese video game designer, producer and game director at Nintendo, where he serves as one of its representative directors. He is the creator of some of the most acclaimed and best-selling game franchises of all time, such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda.
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.
Video games, Business and economy, Science
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".
Zoë Tiberius Quinn is an American video game developer, programmer, writer, and artist. Quinn, who uses the gender-neutral pronoun "they", developed the interactive fiction game Depression Quest, which was released in 2013. In 2014, a blog post by Quinn's ex-boyfriend sparked the Gamergate controversy, in which Quinn was subjected to extensive harassment.
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.
Edward John Boon is an American video game programmer, philanthropist, voice actor, and director who was employed for over 15 years at Midway Games and since 2011 has worked for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in its company NetherRealm Studios. Boon is best known for the widely popular Mortal Kombat series, which he created with John Tobias. Boon and Tobias' last names backwards are the basis for the name of the Mortal Kombat character Noob Saibot.
Demis Hassabis is a British artificial intelligence researcher, neuroscientist, video game designer, entrepreneur, and world-class games player.
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.
Johan Andersson is a Swedish video game designer and studio manager for Paradox Development Studio.
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.