David W. Bradley - Wizardry VII. The best game ever made

Tim Schaefer

Who ever did Lemmings.

And Paul Woakes. I loved Mercenary 3 even though I didn't understand english very well at the time. Perhaps I should play it again and actually understand it this time, hehe. Wonder if I still have the disks.

And a whole bunch of other people who's name I don't know. Somehow music idols' names are easier to remember, or perhaps it's just because game designers never gets as famous.

Edit: Man that was some bad spelling...

[edited by - geekster on August 30, 2002 1:17:52 PM]

My favorite game design was in Tribes 2, designed by Dave Georgeson ( Not 100% on this ). To me it was the most balanced game I''ve ever played, and it gave so many options as to how to help out the team rather than just killing the enemies. Also, the more team work there was the more effective the attack could be ( i.e. targetting lasers, using escorts, etc. ). Dave Georgeson also designed Heavy Gear II, but I haven''t played that so I can''t comment on it.

Adam Sheehan

--Greg Zeschuk, Ray Muzyka, Trent Oster, and everyone else at Bioware. Baldur''s Gate & Neverwinter Nights are a fantastic way to spend 400+ hours of your life. (Or more, if your saved game gets accidently deleted by Privateer 2''s fucked up uninstaller just as you reach Irenicus in BG2 and have to start from scratch)

--Sid Meier - Civ3, Alpha Centauri, and where the hell is Pirates 2?!

--Gumpei Yukoi(sp?) - one of Nintendo''s lead designer, until his death a few years ago(car accident). Ever heard of Metroid, or perhaps a little thingamabob called the GameBoy?

--Shigeru Miyamoto - Mario, Zelda. ''Nuff said.

--Warren Spector - Bar none, the most innovative designer of the past decade. If System Shock and Deus Ex aren''t innovative, than what is?

--Bruce Shelley - helped Sid Meier design Civilization and then moved to Ensemble to make Age of Empires (AoE2 is the only RTS I can stand to play, everything else just sucks (IMHO, of course))

--Brian Richards - also learned from Sid Meier, designed Colonization (sequel, please) and Civilization 2 (& 3, until he left to start Big Huge)

--Chris Roberts, for Privateer and the early WC games only. Not the movies. Definatly not the movies. *shudder*

--Did I mention Warren Spector?

Manfred Trenz. He developed THE games in my youth. I will never forget Turrican or R-Type...

Tim Wisseman for VGA Planets. Thomas Biskup for Ancient Domains of Mistery.

for the record, Diablo and Diablo 2 sucked beyond belief. They ruined the greatest genre of game - ROLEPLAYING

Bill Roper.
Warcraft 2 & 3.

X-Wing CD !!! ow ow ow ow ! XW rocked !!! Still does, actually.
Its one of the best games ever made !!! and it was back in like 92.

Homeworld:Cataclysm. (alot better than HW)

Majesty: the fantasy kingdom sim.(some innotative ideas)

BTW I kinda like D2. Boring as anything, but time-using.

~V''lion

Bugle4d

Oh yeah! Thanks Diodor, how could I have forgot about Tomas Biskup for ADOM! In the words of Comic Shop Guy: Best. Game. Everrrr.

''Your theory of a donut shaped universe is intriguing Homer'' - Stephen Hawking

Perhaps we should break up our idols into two categories: design & innovation. My idols fall into the innovative side.

David Braben & Ian Bell for creating Elite. That game did so much with the least amount of technology. As far as 3D games go, it''s one of the first. Flight Simulator was out but was incredibly boring. Elite was an exciting space combat simulator that allowed you to trade between more than 1000 planets in 8 galaxies. Also, you could be a pirate, bounty hunter, asteroid miner and smuggler.

I think John Carmack deserves his credit where it''s due. Okay, okay! I hear the groaning and I know he''s mainly a programmer, not a designer. But his work in Doom did a lot for the industry at the time. Before Doom, PC games were confined to 640k of memory no matter how much RAM your system had. There were memory managers that allowed you more memory but you had to create boot disks so that your system would have enough initial memory available to run the game. A lot of people new to the game world don''t know about those tedious times. Not only that, but most games were plain polygon-based racing or flying sims because no one was brave enough to write protected mode games that really pushed the systems limits. (BTW, I SHOULD mention that Syndicate by Bullfrog used protected-mode before Doom.) Graphics sucked, gameplay was rough, games ALWAYS crashed, were single-player only (most of the time) and the entire PC game industry was in an aweful rut. Then Doom came out and raised the bar on what a computer game should be.

Now, on the other hand...

Carmack''s idea to create a game engine that others could license was a good one... for HIM, but as for the rest of us, every game I play feels like a Quake variation. So, he gave the industry a boost back in 93/94 (whenever Doom came out) but that same business practice seems to have created a rut. The rest of the industry seems to be leaving id Software in the dust. Doom 3 better be as good as they''re trying to say it is ;-)

- Jay

"I have head-explody!!!" - NNY

Get Tranced!