WScott Adams is an American entrepreneur, computer programmer, and video game designer. He co-founded, with ex-wife Alexis, Adventure International in 1979. The company developed and published video games for home computers. The cornerstone products of Adventure International in its early years were the Adventure series of text adventures written by Adams.
WTarn Adams is an American computer game programmer, best known for his work on Dwarf Fortress. He has been working on the game since 2002 with his older brother Zach. He learned programming in his childhood, and has been designing computer games as a hobby. He quit his first year of a mathematics post doctorate at Texas A&M University to focus on game development in 2006.
WAllan Alcorn is an American pioneering engineer and computer scientist best known for creating Pong, one of the first video games.
WJohan Andersson is a Swedish video game designer and studio manager for Paradox Tinto, a Barcelona-based division of Paradox Interactive.
WDanielle Bunten Berry, formerly known as Dan Bunten, was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game M.U.L.E., one of the first influential multiplayer video games, and 1984's The Seven Cities of Gold.
WTimothée Besset is a French software programmer,, best known for supporting Linux, as well as some Macintosh, ports of id Software's products. He has been involved with the game ports of various id properties over the past ten years, starting with Quake III Arena. Since the development of Doom 3 he was also in charge of the multiplayer network code and various aspects of game coding for id, a role which had him heavily involved in the development of their online game QuakeLive.
WMarc Blank is an American game developer and software engineer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first commercially successful text adventure computer games, Zork.
WThe Blue Sky Rangers is a group of Intellivision game programmers who previously worked for Mattel in the early 1980s.
WBill 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).
WDavid Mark Byttow is an American Internet entrepreneur who was the co-founder and CEO of the mobile application Secret. In October 2018, it was announced that Byttow is now the director of engineering at Snap, Inc.
WTerry Cavanagh is an Irish video game designer based in London, England. After studying mathematics at Trinity College in Dublin, Cavanagh worked briefly as a market risk analyst before focusing on game development full-time. His titles all share a primitive, minimalist aesthetic. He has created over two dozen games, most notably VVVVVV, Super Hexagon, and Dicey Dungeons. He is credited as a programmer for Alphaland, a platform game by Jonas Kyratzes.
WDavid Patrick Crane is a video game designer and programmer.
WWilliam 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.
WDon Daglow is an American computer game and video game designer, programmer and producer. He is best known for being the creator of early games from several different genres, including pioneering simulation game Utopia for Intellivision in 1981, role-playing game Dungeon in 1975, sports games including the first interactive computer baseball game Baseball in 1971, and the first graphical MMORPG, Neverwinter Nights in 1991. He founded long-standing game developer Stormfront Studios in 1988.
WMichael Dailly is a Scottish video game designer, best known for designing Lemmings and 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.
WDr. Bruce Daniels is an American hydroclimatologist, business executive and computer programmer. He is known in Silicon Valley as one of the pioneers of the personal computer and user-friendly interfaces.
WLawrence 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.
WFarbs is the pseudonym of Jarrad Woods, an indie gamer who gained media attention when he quit his job at gaming firm 2K Australia using a video game. When asked in an interview where the idea had come from to quit via video game, Woods stated "At the time there were a lot of articles touting indie games as a form of expression, and I hate writing so I wanted to express my goodbye to the team in some other way. I had planned to leave for a few months, but the message was more spontaneous".
WSteve 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.
WFrantišek Fuka is a Czech computer programmer and musician. He currently works as a film translator, preparing English-language movies for Czech release. He is known also as a film critic, publicist and commentator.
WRichard Allen Garriott de Cayeux is an American video game developer, entrepreneur and astronaut. Although both his parents were American, he maintains dual British and American citizenship by birth.
WRyan C. Gordon is a computer programmer and former Loki Software employee who is now responsible for icculus.org, which hosts many Loki Software projects as well as several new projects created by himself and others. Gordon's site hosts projects with the code from such commercial games as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Quake III Arena and many other free and open source projects for multiple platforms.
WBrian "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.
WGary 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."
WDave 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.
WRebecca Ann Heineman is an American video game designer and programmer. A long-time veteran of the video game industry, Heineman was a founding member of video game companies Interplay Productions, Logicware, Contraband Entertainment, and Olde Sküül. She has been chief executive officer for Olde Sküül since 2013.
WGuido Henkel is a German-born, American designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry, as well as a composer and novelist.
WVeda Hlubinka-Cook is a co-founder of Metaweb. She was a video game programmer at Broderbund in the 1980s. She designed and wrote the games Gumball and D/Generation; was the model for one of the characters in Jordan Mechner's game Prince of Persia; and was technical director for The Last Express. She came out as transgender in 2017.
WAlec Holowka was a Canadian indie game developer and co-founder of independent game companies Infinite Ammo, Infinite Fall, and Bit Blot. He was mainly known for the award-winning titles Night in the Woods and Aquaria.
WBrendan Trexler Iribe is an American game programmer, entrepreneur and the original CEO and co-founder of Oculus VR, Inc. and Scaleform. He is the managing partner at BIG Ventures, an early-stage venture fund.
WJason Jones is an American video game developer and programmer who co-founded the video game studio Bungie with Alex Seropian in 1991. Jones began programming on Apple computers in high school, assembling a multiplayer game called Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete. While attending the University of Chicago, Jones met Seropian and the two formed a partnership to publish Minotaur.
WCharles "Chuck" Jordan is an American game designer, writer, and programmer. He co-wrote The Curse of Monkey Island, wrote three episodes of Sam & Max Save the World, was the lead writer and co-designer of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space, designed and co-wrote two episodes of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, and was the designer of Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse: The Penal Zone, as well as season lead designer for the Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse season on the whole.
WRoger Keating is an Australian computer game designer. Along with Ian Trout, Keating co-founded of the video game company Strategic Studies Group, which is known for its strategic war and fantasy games with artificial intelligence. Keating and Trout worked together on the majority of SSG titles.
WAlan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes Kotok and his classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first true hackers.
WAndré LaMothe is a computer scientist, author, hardware engineer, and game programmer. He has written numerous books on game development and developed video games for Microsoft Windows.
WMinh Le, also known by his online nickname Gooseman, is a Vietnamese Canadian video game programmer who co-created the Half-Life mod Counter-Strike with Jess Cliffe in 1999 and started the Counter-Strike series. He was later employed by Valve, the developers of Half-Life, and worked for 8 years in Korea on the multiplayer first-person shooter Tactical Intervention. He is a contractor on the multiplayer survival first-person shooter Rust. In the small-team games that he has worked on, Le has been a programmer, modeler, and designer.
WPeter David Lebling is an interactive fiction game designer (implementor) and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid.
WDonald Allan Mattrick is a Canadian businessman best known for being the former CEO of social gaming company Zynga, as well as a member of its board of directors. Previously, Mattrick was the president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. In this role, he was responsible for a collection of consumer businesses including Xbox 360, Xbox Live, Xbox One, Kinect, TV Music and Video services, Microsoft Mediaroom, PC and Mobile Interactive Entertainment as well as the manufacturing and supply chain for Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2007, Mattrick served as the president of Worldwide Studios for Electronic Arts, where he worked for 15 years. At only 17, Mattrick founded Distinctive Software, which was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1991 and subsequently became EA Vancouver.
WBrian Moriarty is an American video game developer who authored three of the original Infocom interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer (1985), Trinity (1986), and Beyond Zork (1987), as well as Loom (1990) for LucasArts.
WCory Ondrejka was the Chief Technology Officer of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. With Philip Rosedale, Ondrejka co-founded Second Life and played a significant role in the architecture of the product. After leaving Linden Lab, Ondrejka became Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy for the EMI Group until he left EMI in September 2009. He also was vice president of engineering at Facebook.
WSteve Pavlina is an American self-help author, motivational speaker and entrepreneur. He is the author of the web site stevepavlina.com and the book Personal Development for Smart People.
WMarkus 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.
WPetri Purho is a Finnish game developer and a cofounder of the game studio Nolla Games. He has previously also worked at Finnish independent video game developer studio Frozenbyte. He is best-known for the roguelite Noita and the puzzler Crayon Physics Deluxe, which won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival in 2008.
WJade Raymond is a Canadian video game creator, best known for helping create the Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs franchises, and for building the Ubisoft Toronto and EA Motive Studios. On 16 March 2021, Jade Raymond announced the founding of a new independent development team called Haven Entertainment.
WFrédérick Raynal [fʁedeʁik ʁɛnal] is a French video game designer and programmer, notable for his game developments in Infogrames, Adeline Software International and No Cliché. He is married to Yaël Barroz, a fellow game designer, with whom he has two children.
WTodd Jason Replogle is an American video game programmer best known as the co-creator of the Duke Nukem series. He wrote six 2D action games for MS-DOS released as shareware by Apogee Software between 1990 and 1993. This included Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II, which were side-scrolling platform games.
WJoseph 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.
WStephen Russell, also nicknamed "Slug", is an American computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, well known for being the first widely distributed video game.
WJon Shafer is an American designer and programmer of computer games. He was the lead designer of the strategy game Civilization V, developed by Firaxis.
WMike Singleton was a British video game designer who wrote various well-regarded titles for the ZX Spectrum during the 1980s. His titles include The Lords of Midnight, Doomdark's Revenge, Dark Sceptre, War in Middle Earth and Midwinter. Before developing video games, Singleton was an English teacher in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, England.
WDouglas E. Smith, usually credited as Doug 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.
WMatthew Smith is a British computer game programmer. He created the games Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum, released in 1983 and 1984 respectively. Smith left the games industry in 1988 and later moved to the Netherlands. He has since returned to the UK and has worked on some games as well as appearing at conventions and in documentaries.
WKentucky Route Zero is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Cardboard Computer and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game was first revealed in 2011 via the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter and is separated into five acts that were released sporadically throughout its development; the first releasing in January 2013 and the last releasing in January 2020. The game was originally developed for Linux, Microsoft Windows, and OS X, with console ports for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One under the subtitle of "TV Edition", coinciding with the release of the final act.
WJukka Tapanimäki was a Finnish game programmer from Tampere, Pirkanmaa. Tapanimäki wrote his games for the Commodore 64 computer, and many have been ported to other computer systems. Tapanimäki was a reviewer for MikroBitti and "C" computer magazines; and a freelance writer of advanced-level computer programming articles. He also published a book called C-64 Pelintekijän Opas in 1990.
WWim Odilia Georges Taymans is a Belgian software developer based in Malaga, Spain. Taymans started his career in multimedia development on the Commodore 64 writing various games and demos. He was known in the Commodore 64 coding community under the nickname The Wim. In 1990 he was the coder behind the C64 game Puffy's Saga which was distributed by Ubisoft. He later moved on to the Amiga where he among other things wrote a version of the classic game Boulder Dash.
WHoward Scott Warshaw, also known as HSW, is an American psychotherapist and former game designer. He worked at Atari in the early 1980s, where he designed and programmed the Atari 2600 games Yars' Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
WJoyce Weisbecker is an American retired engineer and actuary. She became the first female commercial video game designer in 1976. She considers herself the first indie developer, given that she did her work as an independent contractor.
WEvan Wells is an American video game designer and programmer, and co-president of Naughty Dog. Wells' first video game was at Sega, where he worked on ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, before moving to Crystal Dynamics in 1995 to work on Gex and Gex: Enter the Gecko. He was employed at Naughty Dog in 1998, working on several Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter titles before becoming co-president of the company alongside Stephen White in 2005; White was replaced the following year by Christophe Balestra, who retired in 2017. The two oversaw the release of the Uncharted series, and The Last of Us. Wells remained the sole president, overseeing the release of The Last of Us Part II, until Neil Druckmann's promotion to co-president in 2020.
WDon Woods is an American hacker and computer programmer. He is best known for his role in the development of the Colossal Cave Adventure game.
WGregory Yob was an American computer game designer.