The Fathers of the Game Industry: 15 Iconic Developers of All Time (Topic)

You can name them in different ways: cult developers, main game developers, top game creators, and in any case, you'd be right. After all, these people are the ones who make the games the way we know and love them. Some of them are still on Olympus, and some are hardly engaged in the creation of new masterpieces, but this does not change the main essence. Continuing a series of materials on how games are created, we have collected for you the most famous "fathers" of the gaming industry.

1. Sid Meier - programmer, designer

Who is he: creator of civilization, creator of strategies

Creativity : Proven that you can make smart games as fun as some meaty shooters.

Merit: He is rightfully considered one of the main founders of American gaming. He belongs to the title of the person who created the strategies, because his Civilization is their mother. He, with his studio, MicroProce, created in 1982, has created a bunch of crazy games and made his name as a brand. In the industry for almost 40 years.

2. Hideo Kojima - Game Designer, Producer

Who is he: former VP of Konami and just a genius

Creative Feature: Creates intricate plots and brings cinematic elements to games

Merit: I won't be kidding if I say that by going to Kojima's Instagram under any post, for example, with his lunch, you will find comments like: "Kojima is a genius!" , "Brilliant!", "Brilliant breakfast of a genius!" And although people exaggerate, in fact it is. He is the creator of real masterpieces like Metal Gear, which gave birth to stealth action and other Konami projects. It is very remarkable that at the beginning of his career, his ideas were called too difficult and commercially unsuccessful. He has been in the industry for over 30 years today.

3. Ken Levin - Game Designer

Who is he: a person capable of making artistic storytelling a mechanic

Creativity: Uses a playwright's education to create games

Merit : Typically, great games are those that take the player into a fantasy world, a perfectly scripted game, and add up to hundreds of hours of fun. These are exactly what Ken Leewin creates. One of his innovations is an announcer or a third-party character who tells the story, instead of cutscenes. Thief, System Shock 2, Bioshock are his brainchildren, which perfectly show how the plot leads the gameplay. By the way, he is credited with creating smart shooters.

4. Edward Boone - Programmer, Producer

Who is he: Creator of Mortal Kombat

Creative feature: can create new mechanics from glitches

Merit: Traditionally, people who love fighting games are divided into three categories: those who love any fighting game, those who love Street Fighter and those who love Mortal Kombat. Contradictions usually arise between the latter two. But as often happens, Mortal Kombat fans win, and thanks to Ed Boone for that, he brought a huge amount of chips into the game: blocks, versatile combat and, of course, bloody finishing off “fatalities” that even those who have heard about who didn't play games. It also helped kickstart the success of games with audiences of 18+ and inspired other developers to create games with a fair amount of violence.

5. American McGee - Game Designer

Who is he: a genius who has lost opportunities

Creative ability: work as a dishwasher, a ring grinder in a jewelry store, a consultant in a music store, and then take on and become a creative director at EA

Merit: American has worked for this powerful company for 5 years. He mastered programming before graduating from school, and then jumped around the professions until he became a neighbor of another future father of the industry, John Carmack, who arranged for him to support idSoftware, and a year later the American was sitting in the director's chair and the darkest and most terrible levels emerged from under his hand DOOM, Quake, Quake 2. Setting the standard for fear, he created the beautiful and scary American McGee's Alice and its sequel.

6. David Jaffe - Game Designer

Who is he: Creator of Twisted Metal and God of War

Creativity: suggest Sony sues Microsoft over Scrap Metal, LucasFilm over War of The Gods as they are similar to Twisted Metal and God of War.

Merit: a person who was a tester at Sony, then he was entrusted with Mickey Mania, then he was transferred to Utah, where he produced Twisted Metal, and later made this project a key project for the second curling iron. While working on various parts of the series, he slowly sketched a concept for a game where you need to knead huge gods into meat and called it God of War, which became an icon for Sony.

7. Will Wright - Game Designer

Who is he: the creator of the genre of sims

Creativity: to come up with a game in which the creation of the character and his environment is more important than the gameplay itself.

Merit: He is the person who gave the world SimCity, The Sims, Spore, and thus staked out his place as one of the geniuses of the industry. He also masterpiece knows how to insert into his games all the juiciest of pop culture.

8. Tim Schafer - Game Designer

Who is he: gave quests a new life

Creativity: to be a jack-of-all-trades developer: write a script, and dialogues, come up with riddles, and engage in game design.

Merit: Worked at LucasArt for over 10 years and released Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle under his design wing, wrote the script for Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. He gave the genre of interactive quests a new lease on life, and makes him replay his projects over and over again. By the way, his play Psyhonauts won the British Film Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

9. Randy Pitchford - Game Designer

Who is he : Director of Gearbox Software

Creativity: first created a game at age 11 on a computer designed by his father.

Merit: he created add-ons for Half Life, Countre Strike, helped produce the Brother in Arm series, and produced Borderland in full. It's funny that before he started making games he was a magician and quite famous. Maybe past experience helped him surprise us?

10. Cliff Bliejinski - Game Designer

Who is he: ingenious greedy man

Creativity : Create cool games under a stupid alias

Merit: being warmed by his skills in 1992 by Tim Swindy, the director of a small unremarkable company Epic games (yes, the one in which Fortnite breaks the charts today and remains the most hit battle royale), he was commissioned to make his first project Dare to Dream, which, although it was a failure, showed Cliff's dedication and he was given a second chance. It was Unreal, which thanks to it became a multiplayer of increased meatiness, and also gave the world the most famous game engine. We also have Gears of War thanks to Cliff.

11. Rob Pardo - Game Designer

Who is he: VP of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment

Creativity: Design games to be named one of the 100 Influential People in the World in 2006 by Time Magazine.

Merit: The man did more for the once feeble Blizzard than Moses did for the entire Jewish people. Before joining the nearby family, he worked on the first 3D version of Wolfenstein and Descent. It all started with helping Blizzard design StarCraft and away we go. It is thanks to him that you, our reader, know about games such as Diablo 2, WarCraft 2, World of Warcraft.

12. John Carmack - Programmer

Who is he: literally the father of the game industry, the founder of idSoftware (the same neighbor of Americana McGee).

Creativity: create a shooter genre and then start building spaceships.

Merit: He worked on Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, which have become a technological breakthrough. It was through his lines of code that he laid the foundations for game programming and set the bar for what a video game is.

13. Alexey Pajitnov - programmer, game designer

Who is he: creator of the first world-class AAA project

Creativity: Create the most popular game in the galaxy and get nothing.

Merit: When Steven Spielberg saw him, he ran up screaming and asking if he could touch him. He is the creator of Tetris. Tetris, which the whole world played. Is this not enough for you?

14. Shigeru Miyamoto - Game Designer

Who is he: CEO of Nintendo

Creativity: play guitar as well as games

Merit: he is called the father of modern games. This man influenced the gaming industry with the creation of Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, which today are an icon of video games and pop culture, whose success they still cannot surpass. The father of the studio Nintendo, which can still loudly hit Sony and Microsoft in the face. However, he is a very humble person who commutes to work by bike.

15. Gabe Newell - Game Designer

Who is he: God of Gaming, Saint Gaben, founder of Valve

Creativity: being very fat and very rich

Merit: he worked at Microsoft on early versions of Windows, and then created his own studio Valve, along with Half-Life and Steam. He gave breath to Counter Strike, Day of Defense, Team Fortress and Portal. If you are a gamer and want to feel its impact right now, please take a look at the steam icon on your taskbar.

These were the most famous game developers. We need to know our heroes. We also advise you to read our past material, and find out why even such geniuses need publishers.

The Topic of Article: The Fathers of the Game Industry: 15 Iconic Developers of All Time.
Author: Jake Pinkman