Making video games is an arduous vocation. It often means working long days to meet unrealistic deadlines. With people’s subjective tastes in the medium, it also means never pleasing everyone. Yet for all its difficulty, there must be something incredibly rewarding in it for so many people to work in the field. Heck, some people spend their entire working life crafting video games. This list will examine and salute industry veterans who have spent more than three decades in the medium. This is impressive for any job, but doubly remarkable when considering the pressure and stress video game development entails.
10 Shigeru Miyamoto
Crafting just one classic franchise qualifies anyone for video game legend status, but one becomes a mythical creature when they’ve had a hand in as many iconic series as Shigeru Miyamoto.
He directed Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong. On top of that, he’s served as producer on numerous other Nintendo Franchises. He hasn’t served as director of a game for a while, but he still has a major role in the creative direction of the company’s biggest games.
9 John Romero
John Romero may have some of the most beautiful hair in the industry, but he’s so much more than silky smooth locks. He co-founded Id Software with John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack. While at the company, he worked on all-time classic shooters such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake.
After leaving Id, he had a major misstep with infamous Daikatana, but he continued marching on and now works at Romero games, which he founded with his wife, Brenda. The two are currently working on Empire of Sin, a turn-based strategy game set in the prohibition era.
8 Takashi Tezuka
Takashi Tezuka’s name is perhaps less known than Shigeru Miyamoto, but he is responsible for just as many readers’ childhoods. He joined Nintendo in 1984, and just a few years later he was designing some of their most iconic games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.
He directed Super Mario World on the SNES, often considered the peak of the plumber’s two-dimensional adventures. More recently, he served as producer on Super Mario Maker 2.
7 Will Wright
It’s Will Wight people have to thank for bringing the cultural phenomenon that is The Sims to the world. However, his career stretches far beyond that 2000 title. His first breakout success was 1989’s SimCity, which tasked players with managing an entire metropolis.
The computer game also found a home on the SNES, where its audience expanded significantly. His last big title was 2009’s Spore, which didn’t garner the same praise as his prior work, but he’s currently deep in an exciting new mobile game called Proxi.
6 Richard Garriott
Richard Garriott basically created the first RPG video game. 1980’s Akalabeth: World of Doom was his attempt to bring the Dungeons and Dragons mechanics to a virtual space. From there, he created and iterated on the Ultima series, a franchise full of groundbreaking Western RPGs.
Ultima Online was an innovative MMO for its time, featuring a higher player count and far superior graphics to anything prior. The dude has also literally been to space. His most recent game is 2018’s Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, a fantasy RPG spiritually linked to his iconic Ultima series.
5 Hironobu Sakaguchi
Hironobu Sakaguchi was one more flop away from leaving video games back in the mid 1980s. He had long wanted to make an RPG, but the company he worked for refused for the longest time, until finally taking a chance on one. That company was Squaresoft, and the game was Final Fantasy.
As everyone knows, the game was a huge hit, spawning a massive franchise that’s still kicking to this day. Sakaguchi worked on the first twelve games in the series before departing Square Enix. His more recent output has been on mobile devices.
4 Sid Meier
Even people who have never played a Sid Meier game know the name simply because it’s printed on everything he works on. He’s not the only designer to put his name on the boxes, but he certainly earned the right to do so.
Not only did he design classics like Civilization and Pirates, but he also co-founded Firaxis games, which has recently released modern classics like XCOM. Simulations can sometimes be boring, but Sid manages to make his strategy games engaging through and through.
3 Keiji Inafune
His reputation is a little marred by the recently released Might Number 9, but Keiji’s contribution to gaming can’t be tarnished by one lackluster game. As both an artist and producer, he had a hand in almost every Mega Man game, and produced the Mega Man Legends series.
Legends in particular is noteworthy for being a fully three dimensional Mega Man and having several innovative mechanics like a karma system. 3D action RPGs were few and far between on the PlayStation, and Mega Man Legends was the best of them.
2 Mark Cerny
Mark Cerny is only fifty-four years old, but he has been in the industry since 1982. At only eighteen years of age, he designed Marble Madness. His resume is a string of successes with classics like the Crash Bandicoot series and Spyro the Dragon. In more recent years, he has garnered fame for being the PS4’s lead architect. Lesser known is the similar role he served in the PS Vita’s development. Cerny currently lives in Japan, and is fluent in the language. Sony fans will surely be hearing from the veteran game designer in the coming months as more info on the PS5 is revealed.
1 Hideo Kojima
Few game designers are considered true auteurs, but Kojima often receives this designation. In his youth he aspired to be filmmaker, but his interests soon turned to games. Through the Metal Gear franchise, he has expanded the scope of what types of stories people can tell in video games, and raised the bar for voice acting and dialogue within the art form.
Few artists still continue to surprise and excite people after working on their craft for more than thirty years, but fans are currently waiting in anticipation for Death Stranding, the enigmatic new IP from Kojima coming out this November.
