Who are your game dev heroes?

edited in General
Mirroring the article of the same name over at Gamasutra, who are YOUR game dev heroes?

Comments

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    I look up to Shigeru Miyamoto, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Hideo Kojima (I played a lot of Japanese games back in the day), Peter Molyneux (listening to ANY of his talks always psyched me up to make games, even if what he was talking about wasn't likely to happen) and recently Jenova Chen.
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    My hero is Mike Ambinder - but then I'm a special case :P
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    Rob Daviau - who wakened me to new ideas of permanence and balance
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    Rami Ismail goes without saying, the Vlambeer hero is hardworking and does the right thing when it matters.

    Daniel Solis is a graphic designer by day in the boardgames industry, but by night he designs and publishes his own boardgames with the focus on card games. He's very active on social media and knows how to get things rolling, game design and business wise.

    Peter Molyneux is awesome but perhaps a bit off the rails. But he's still given my all my best childhood games.

    Michael Brough of Hack686 is awesome, I love his approach to game design and hope to make something as good one day :)

    Richard Garfield is a god of tabletop, after making Magic and probably being able to live off its royalties for life, he still made yet more stuff, and even made the absolute polar binary opposite of it in the form of Netrunner. This guy.
  • Related awesomeness: The Critical Path Project.

    As a side note: the bold text in my original post was an accident from copy pasting the names (making sure I spelt them right). Subsequent posts followed the (implied) rule. It's something I see happening all the time on forums but rarely manage to do in video games. Why is that?
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    When I was a kid I'd read about game designers overseas and quietly wish I could be like them. Ever since the stories behind Uplink and Darwinia came to my attention, I've kinda idolised Chris Delay. I met him and Mark Morris in 2011, best day ever :)

    These days I want to be like Zoe Quinn because she's amazing and has the courage to do things I've always dreamed about.

    (The list of heroes that I now count as friends is fucking terrifying, I have no idea what I'm doing right in life, but I hope I don't stop)
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    I'd like to be more like Jan Willem from Vlambeer.

    I saw him and a couple others at a festival jamming a game about flying around as a seagull once. I couldn't help think to myself "There's no potential in this game, all that's happening is a bird is slowly flying around in 3rd person". I'm not sure if I was being stupid or envious.

    I think having the force of curiosity to pursue a stupid idea anyway is a special stength that Jan Willem has, and I lost along the way. I've somehow learnt to shoot down ideas quickly, even before they're tested, instead of learning to test ideas quickly, and see what actually happens.
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  • I'm going to have to be pretty typical here and say my biggest influence is definitely Shigeru Miyamoto :)

    I've honestly learned so much from his games and playing his work and constantly discover more nuance when replaying older mario games :P

    Also I have a total indie man crush on Edmund McMillen >.<
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    Phil fish, because at the end, he finished , and fez was good.......lol.
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    Warren Spector and Harvey Smith, for games that emphasise reactive, flexible, emergent play through well-crafted levels and game systems. Deus Ex is pretty much the game I always wanted to make, and they got there first and did it better. :P
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    @Gazza_N Warren Spector was also the creative director on Epic Mickey, after he left the team of Ion Storm, and Epic Mickey isn't particularly emergent or good.

    Frankly, I don't think Warren Spector had much to do with what was good about Deus Ex. But most people give him credit for it because he was producer on it (and a lot of other good games). When he had more control in his own company, and was creative director, coincidentally the games he made got worse.

    Though I do agree that Harvey Smith is genuinely brilliant.
  • I think there's probably a damaging and disingenuous trend of attributing large productions to a single person. Very few (if any) games can truly claim to be the sole work of an individual and any time there's a team of, say, more than 4-5, you'll probably find it difficult to pick one particular person who was most influential in its creation. Even film has this problem, what with recent examples of directors like Ang Lee seemingly taking full credit for Life of Pi, and surely many more examples I don't know about.

    Inevitably, it tends to be the team's lead or spokesperson/public face who finds the work attributed to them, even when they don't try to stake any individual claims, just because it's easier to say 'that person made that game', rather than 'that very large group of people made that game as a collaborative effort'. Games are made by teams, not by people (99.9% of the time).

    So yeah, stuff like this is hard, and I actually feel like it discredits the 'little guys in the trenches', who produced that random crate or lit this scene or wrote that inventory code. Maybe those small efforts aren't so important, but without each little piece, you don't have a puzzle anymore.

    Now, with that disclaimer out of hand, and my blanket having dried off and warmed, I still completely agree that there are single figures who are inspiring or visionary, and who can influence many, many others. Miyamoto and Chen are the examples listed in this discussion so far (with perhaps Delay, Carmack, Abrash and Rami added as well!) I can most agree with in that regard, and I'll have to add my personal choice of Daisuke Amaya, whose actions speak louder than his words.
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  • Hideki Kamiya - He's credits include various Resident Evil's, Devil May Cry's, Viewtiful Joe, Okami and Bayonetta.
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    Joakim Sandberg is a solo developer that does lots of things I don't even see whole indie teams get right and still make the presentation look solid, and like Locomalito he does it all for free. I haven't seen so many people as dedicated and talented as that man. Also, Tokuro Fujiwara, for being Mr. Hyde to Miyamoto's Jekyll.
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    @BlackShipsFilltheSky: I know he only had a passing role in Deus Ex, and whether he succeeded in later projects is immaterial. I respect Spector for his stated design ethos - make games where player choice is reflected in the game world and/or mechanics, so that it *matters*. Nobody can argue that the projects he's been involved in have lacked that.
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    @Gazza_N I'm arguing that when Warren Spector has a controlling creative role in a project that "make games where player choice is reflected in the game world and/or mechanics, so that it *matters*" isn't one of the design principles.

    And I'm arguing that when Warren Spector has a controlling creative role in a project, like with Epic Mickey where he owned the studio, it's a truer reflection of the sort of developer he is than when he's taking the role of producer.

    And also it's very easy to mouth the words: "make games where player choice is reflected in the game world and/or mechanics, so that it *matters*" but putting money behind that is a much larger commitment (which he didn't do when it was his money).

    I'm not arguing that he isn't a great producer, and that he he hasn't worked on brilliant projects. Just that attributing to him the work of the designers he is working with is wrong.

    Check out Spector's credits: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,127/
  • @BlackShipsFilltheSky: Spector has given lots of talks about that as a thing for designers to focus on. His GDCA awards speech a few years ago was pretty amazing as well, really inspiring stuff :)

    Epic Mickey sounds like there was a lot of Disney bothering going on behind the scenes, so maybe it didn't work for those reasons. I dunno though, if someone is inspired by what they perceive someone else is doing, then yay? Maybe pointing out other people that are doing that stuff too would be neat, like expand the pool of inspiration, maybe with more devs that are easier to engage with and talk to?
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    Roberta Williams (Kings Quest/Sierra). When I first walked into the computer shop as a kid and noticed the cursor keys makes the dude on the screen move... this game and others that followed from the Sierra stable changed my life forever and she is my no. 1 game dev heroine.
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    @dislekcia I'm sure it was a nightmare working with Disney. But I'm not holding Warren Spector accountable for the production problems on the Epic Mickey franchise (which there were many, and that's certainly Disney's fault). Rather I'm saying that even on paper Epic Mickey wasn't a game with meaningful actions. The core mechanic of the game demonstrates a failure to grasp how players experience agency.

    Again, I'm not trying to say that Warren Spector isn't a good producer, or isn't a good games writer. But if we're talking about "games that emphasise reactive, flexible, emergent play through well-crafted levels and game systems" then we're not talking about something Warren Spector is good at, just something he's been involved with in the past.

    I think Randy Smith (who worked as a designer on the Thief series and more recently went indie with Waking Mars) is a much better person to look to for inspiration on making games with meaningful player choices. Randy Smith and Harvey Smith have done some very informative talks about breaking down many aspects of how they design games (at least once they did a GDC talk together).

    Though I'm more of a Tom Francis man myself :P
  • Tom Francis
    Derek Yu
    Hideo Kojima

    I don't think I need reasons :P
  • David Cage, Tim Schafer, Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto and Tetsuya Takahashi.
  • Richard Pieterse,Evan Greenwood and Barney the dinosaur :P
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