56 Video game designers

Jason D. Anderson, usually credited as Jason Anderson, is a video game developer. He started out as a contract artist for Interplay on the USCF Chess project. He was later hired to work on Fallout for which he became Lead Technical Artist, working on the original game design, interface, and quests. After working on the prototype design for Fallout 2, Anderson left with fellow developers Timothy Cain and Leonard Boyarsky to found Troika Games. After Troika Games collapsed, Anderson left the game industry for a short time to sell real estate.

Sam Barlow is a British video game designer, best known as the writer and designer of Her Story and the two British Silent Hill games, Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. He previously worked as a game director at Climax Studios, before leaving in 2014 to become an indie game developer. He published his first independent game, Her Story, in June 2015.

Daniel Benmergui is an independent game designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina known for the creation of art games such as Today I Die, I Wish I Were the Moon, and Storyteller.

Jens Peder Bergensten, also known as Jeb, is a Swedish video game programmer. He is best known as the lead designer of Minecraft. In 2013, he, along with Minecraft creator Markus Persson, was named as one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world. As an employee of Mojang Studios, he had been co-developing Minecraft with Persson since 2010, became the lead designer in 2011, and assumed full control in 2014, when Persson left the company after its acquisition.

Endless Ages was a computer game by American studio Avaria Corporation of the massively multiplayer online first person shooting genre with elements of role play, such as character classes, quests, an auction system-based economy and a player-versus-player combat system. When released for beta in Spring 2001 it was the first multiplayer online game to merge first person shooting and role-playing. The game had its full commercial release on July 1, 2003.

Bill Budge is an American video game programmer and designer. He is best known for the Apple II games Raster Blaster (1981) and Pinball Construction Set (1983).

Claude Comair is the founder of DigiPen Institute of Technology and co-founder of the Nintendo Software Technology Corporation. While at Nintendo Software Technology, a subsidiary of Nintendo Co. Ltd. of Kyoto, Comair held the title of Chairman and CTO, and later, Chairman of the Board. Comair continues to be the President and CEO of DigiPen Institute of Technology to the present day.

William Crowther is a computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. 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.

Shelley M. Day is a former producer of video games. She began her career in 1985, at Electronic Arts. Day also worked for Accolade, Taito and LucasArts before founding Humongous Entertainment together with colleague Ron Gilbert. She created the famous Putt-Putt series' eponymous protagonist as a bedtime story for her son, which later became a popular series of children's video games. In 1999 she was listed on Time Magazine as one of the "Cyber Elite". After leaving Humongous Entertainment in 2001, Day and Gilbert founded Hulabee Entertainment to provide online games for kids, with approximately 20 former Humongous Entertainment staff joining them.

Lawrence E. "Larry" DeMar is a video game and pinball designer and software programmer. He is known as co-designer, alongside Eugene Jarvis, of the classic arcade games Defender and Robotron: 2084.

Les Edgar is an entrepreneur, known for being the co-founder and joint managing director of Bullfrog Productions, which he set up with Peter Molyneux. After Bullfrog's acquisition by Electronic Arts in 1995, Edgar became a vice president there. Edgar left Bullfrog in 1999, and eventually left the video gaming industry for the automotive industry, where he reintroduced Aston Martin to racing, and became chairman of TVR, which has, under his leadership, set up partnerships with Gordon Murray and Cosworth. Edgar has stated that he intends to return TVR to Le Mans 24 Hours.

Noah Falstein is a game designer and producer who has been in the video game industry since 1980. He was one of the first 10 employees at Lucasfilm Games, DreamWorks Interactive, and The 3DO Company. He runs The Inspiracy and writes the "Better by Design" column for Game Developer magazine. He was hired by Google in April 2013 as 'Chief Game Designer', where he worked for 4 years before leaving in April 2017.

Steve Fawkner is an Australian video game designer, programmer, and composer. He created the Warlords game series in 1989 and more recently the Puzzle Quest series.

Toby Gard is an English video game character designer and consultant. He was part of the team that created fictional female British archaeologist Lara Croft. Lara Croft was awarded a Guinness World Record recognizing her as the "most successful human video game heroine."

Brian "Psychochild" Green was an American software engineer, game developer and game designer known for his work on one of the first 3D, MMORPG's in existence, Meridian 59. Operated now by Open Source volunteers, the Meridian 59 servers continue operation after more than nearly twenty-five years.

Gary Grigsby is a designer and programmer of computer wargames. In 1997, he was described as "one of the founding fathers of strategy war games for the PC." Computer Games Magazine later dubbed him "as much of an institution in his niche of computer gaming as Sid Meier, Will Wright, or John Carmack are in theirs."

Dave Grossman is an American game programmer and game designer, most known for his work at Telltale Games and early work at LucasArts. He has also written several children's books, and a book of "guy poetry" called Ode to the Stuff in the Sink.

Stieg Hedlund is a computer and video game designer, artist, and writer with over 25 years of experience who has worked on more than 30 games in the video game industry. Although he is probably best known for his work in action RPGs, he has also worked on games in each of the real-time strategy, tactical shooter, beat-'em-up and action-adventure genres on the PC and almost every dedicated game console. He has a professed interest in conlangery and linguistics.

Guido Henkel is a German-born, American designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry, as well as a composer and novelist.

Florian Hufsky was an Austrian new media artist, political activist, founder and former board member of the Pirate Party of Austria. He studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, but committed suicide before he could finish his studies.

Rod Humble is the former Chief Executive Officer of Second Life creator Linden Lab, Chief Creative Officer at ToyTalk and former Executive Vice President for the EA Play label of the video game company Electronic Arts. He is the general manager for the San Francisco studio of SGN. He has been contributing to the development of games since 1990, and is recently best known for his work on the Electronic Arts titles, The Sims 2 and The Sims 3. Previously he worked at Sony Online where he worked on EverQuest and before that Virgin Interactive's SubSpace.

Sjoerd De Jong, also known as Hourences, is a Dutch-Belgian game developer, level designer and the founder of Teotl Studios. He also serves as evangelist for Epic Games, promoting Unreal Engine 4 in the northern half of Europe.

Jeffrey Kaplan is an American video game designer who is vice president of Blizzard Entertainment. He designed elements of World of Warcraft and is the lead designer on Overwatch.

Heather Kelley is a media artist and video game designer. She is co-founder of the Kokoromi experimental game collective, with whom she produces and curates the annual Gamma game event promoting experimental games as creative expression in a social context. She is regular jury member for different computer gaming festivals and public speaker at technology events.

Mark E. Kern is a Taiwanese-American video game designer best known for being a team lead on the video game World of Warcraft and a founder of Red 5 Studios.

Raphael "Raph" Koster 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. From 2006 until 2013 he worked as the founder and president of Metaplace producing a Facebook game platform.

Eric M. Lang is a game designer. He began his career as a playtester for FASA before publishing his first game, Mystick independently in 2000. He has since worked with publishers Fantasy Flight Games, WizKids, and CMON among others. He is the recipient of the 2016 Diana Jones Award. In March 2017, Lang became CMON's director of game design.

John MacInnes is an Anglo-American screenwriter and director, noted for writing the script of the video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Laralyn McWilliams is an American game designer and video game producer.

Walid Sultan Midani is the founder and CEO of DigitalMania Studio, the first video game development studio in Tunisia.

Albert A. Nofi, is an American military historian, defense analyst, and designer of board and computer wargaming systems.

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov is a Russian video game designer and computer engineer who developed Tetris while working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D center.

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 in 2009.

Pierrot, born Tamás Zoltán Marosi is a Hungarian pop singer, computer and tabletop game designer, musician and producer, best known internationally for his video game series AGON and Yoomurjak's Ring. He is also well known in Hungary as a musician, singer-songwriter and producer of several music albums. His own music style is primarily acoustic “adult pop”, while as a producer, he has a colorful portfolio of various styles ranging from world music to alternative rock to reggae and hip-hop. He has also been involved in edutainment and tourism projects such as an interactive sight-seeing game network Kaland&Játék (Adventure&Game). He is author of a book on Asian gastronomy, a series of novels and a story-book for children. The name Pierrot had originally been his nickname. He has been using this alias both as musician and game developer since 1986.

Pat Proctor is a Kansas State Representative, representing the 41st House District. He was first elected in November 2020.

William Pugh is a game designer best known for his work on The Stanley Parable. In 2015, he opened an indie game development studio, Crows Crows Crows.

Paul Reiche III is an American game designer, particularly known for his work on video games. Reiche is best known for being the co-creator, together with Fred Ford, of the Star Control universe.

Joseph Warren Robinett Jr. is a designer of interactive computer graphics software, notable as the developer of the Atari 2600's Adventure — the first graphical adventure video game — and as a founder of The Learning Company, where he designed Rocky's Boots and Robot Odyssey. More recently he has worked on virtual reality projects.

Behdad Sami is an Iranian American professional basketball player. Behdad was the world's first Iranian basketball player to play professionally at any level in the United States when he played in the minor-league American Basketball Association in 2007. In October 2010, he became the first Iranian to play pro basketball in Portugal.

Alexander Seropian is an American video game developer, one of the initial founders and later president of Bungie, the developer of the Marathon, Myth, and Halo video game series. Seropian became interested in computer programming in college and teamed up with fellow student Jason Jones to publish Jones's game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete. The two became partners, and Bungie grew to become the best-known Apple Macintosh game developer before being bought by Microsoft in 2001.

Jon Shafer is an American designer and programmer of computer games. He was the lead designer of the strategy game Civilization V, developed by Firaxis.

Jeremiah Slaczka, also known by his nickname Miah, is a video game designer/creative director and co-founder of 5TH Cell, a video game developer in Bellevue, Washington. He is best known for being the concept creator and Director of Scribblenauts as well as the million-seller hit video game Drawn to Life and 5TH Cell's critically acclaimed Lock's Quest, all for the Nintendo DS. Jeremiah is credited as the Director, Lead Designer, Story Writer, Original Concept Creator and Art Director for both Drawn to Life and Lock's Quest.

Douglas E. Smith was a video game designer best known as the author of the 8-bit game Lode Runner (1983) considered a seminal work of the 1980s.

Luke Michael Smith is an American writer. He is a staff member at Bungie, a video game development company, and is a former video games journalist. Smith wrote for a college newspaper and weekly papers in Michigan before being hired as one of the first new freelance writers for Kotaku. At Kotaku, Smith developed his writing style but soon left the site for a staff position as 1UP.com's news editor. Smith made a name for himself at 1UP, particularly through an article he wrote focusing on problems with the game Halo 2.

Jonatan Söderström, also known by his internet pseudonym Cactus, is a Swedish video game developer best known as co-designer and programmer of Hotline Miami (2012) and Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (2015). Prior to that, he developed over 40 small video games. All of them were created with Game Maker. When asked about his game design style in an interview, Söderström replied "Variation can be good, but so can consistency. When I make games I try to keep them unified and to the point, so I don't drift off too far. It's also one of the reasons most of my games are so short, when I feel like I want to turn the game in a new direction I usually explore that new direction in a separate game instead". This further explains Söderström's unusually high output of concentrated games, most of which were developed within a span of two years.

Michael J. Stemmle is a computer game writer, designer, and director who cocreated some of LucasArts' adventure games in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Goichi Suda , commonly known by the nickname Suda51, is a Japanese video game designer, writer and director. He is the founder and CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture, which has produced some of his most recognized work including The Silver Case, Flower, Sun, and Rain, killer7, and the No More Heroes series. Suda is from Nagano Prefecture in Japan, moving to Tokyo at the age of 18 and eventually being hired as a designer at Human Entertainment after having a number of other jobs including as an undertaker. After leaving Human Entertainment, he founded Grasshopper Manufacture and worked on their debut title The Silver Case as writer, director and designer. The Silver Case helped establish both Suda and his company in Japan, but Suda and Grasshopper gained international attention with the release of killer7, Suda's first title to be released outside Japan.

Ragnar Tørnquist is a Norwegian game designer and author. He has been working for Funcom in Oslo since 1994, and has founded his own studio Red Thread Games in November 2012.

Scott Tsumura is a Japanese-born American video game producer. He has produced and localized a number of iconic video games such as Spelunker, Lode Runner, Moon Patrol, Kung-Fu Master and R-Type Dimensions. He is the co-founder and executive producer at Tozai, inc, based in Bellevue, Washington.

Andy Tudor is a video game designer. He is the Creative Director for the video game developer Slightly Mad Studios in London, England.

Kotaro Uchikoshi is a Japanese video game director and writer. He is known for his work on visual novels, including the Infinity and Zero Escape series. His writing style often incorporates elements of science fiction with various scientific and philosophical themes, and makes heavy use of plot twists.

Anton "Tony" Vilgotsky is a Russian musician, composer, horror and fantasy writer, playwright, and musical columnist. He is mostly known for his fantasy and horror novels as well as his journalist work in such magazines like Dark City, Mir Fantastiki, OM, KVIR and Darker.

Robin Walker is an Australian video game designer best known for co-developing Quake Team Fortress, Team Fortress Classic, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life: Alyx. He went to RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Tony Warriner is a video game designer, programmer and co-founder of Revolution Software. At a young age he started playing adventure games, when they were just text adventures. He wrote his first game, Obsidian, while he was at school and sent it to Artic Computing for consideration. Artic's director, Charles Cecil, loved the game and convinced him to license it to Artic, and then to join Artic as a programmer. At Artic he wrote, together with Adam Waring, Ultima Ratio which was published in 1987 by Firebird. In the same year he got a job at Cecil's Paragon Programming, where games from US publishers were converted to European platforms. When Cecil had left to work for U.S. Gold, Warriner started doing 8-bit programming for games. In 1988 he created Death Stalker, published by Codemasters. In the same year he joined Cascade Games, where he worked on 19 Part One: Boot Camp, Arcade Trivia Quiz, and Arcade Trivia Quiz Question Creator. In 1989 Warriner moved to Bytron Aviation Systems based in Kirmington, Lincolnshire, where he wrote software for the aviation industry, David Sykes was his fellow programmer.

Tim Willits is the former studio director and level designer of id Software, the American video game developer company. As of August 2019, Willits is the chief creative officer at Saber Interactive.

Derek Yu is an American indie game designer, artist, and blogger. Yu is known for a number of indie games he helped design: Spelunky, Aquaria, and Eternal Daughter. He is also known for blogging and creating websites about independent video games.