Game designers? Well, if I see a good game, I usually dont look at who made what exactly, but speaking in teams, the following are in my top :

1. the guys that designed the maps for UT2003
2. The guys that designed the backgrounds for the Curse of Monkey Island.
3. The map-designers for Unreal 1. Still great.

I had the pleasure of finding out that Tom Loper co-designed "Towering Inferno" for the Atari system, a game that I spent many hours playing when I was younger.

He was producer for a number of titles, among them: "Mechwarrior" for the SNES, "The Three Stooges" and "Thunderbirds" for the NES...The list goes on.

I loved "Maniac Mansion"! I never got to play "Day of the Tentacle".

I think it is hard to mention the names that the press doesn''t drop simply because with only a 125,000 employed people in the industry (that is including lawyers and non-game developers related to management and the like) just in the US, there can be only so many game designers.

Easy!
1. Bruce Shelly - Age of Franchise
2. John Carmack - Quake and Doom
3. Will Wright - Everything Sims

Current Project: Learn DirectX
00% complete

If you want obscure: Graham Nelson - Curses

Less obscure: David Braben - Elite
Will Crowther & Don Woods - Adventure

my opinion is that still Sid Meier rules for civ

next John Carmack

A Quick question, How much time does John Carmack spend in game design, as opposed to engine design? The id engines are beautiful, but I wouldn''t call Carmack a designer for Half-life, even if he designed the engine. How much does he do?

I nominate sid meier (silent service), sid meier (railroad tycoon), and sid meier (gettysburg - oh yeah)

quote: Original post by dede
A Quick question, How much time does John Carmack spend in game design, as opposed to engine design? The id engines are beautiful, but I wouldn't call Carmack a designer for Half-life, even if he designed the engine. How much does he do?

Well, he didn't design the engine for Half-Life, so you don't need to worry about it. (He created an engine they based it on, but it was changed a LOT before it was used in half-life. If they used the Quake 2 engine as the base like some people say, they also optimized it about ten billion percent, but I always thought they used quake 1 in which case they just added features without slowing it down too much {but HL requires like 4 times the PC Q1 did, so it wouldn't be hard to add features without a visible impact}).

I would nominate Shigeru Miyamoto as one of the best designers ever.

[edited by - Extrarius on April 9, 2003 4:40:06 PM]

Richard Garriot...
I think he deserves a ton of props. I have NEVER been so immersed in a game world as I was in Ultima 6 & 7 (and Savage World too). It was like he created an entire alternate planet where you could roam as you please, and kill whoever you wanted to (except himself aka Lord British [unless you cheat ]). The world almost seem alive as the people would have homes they would go to at night and jobs durring the day ect. I used to kill the owner of a home and claim it for my self by redecorating and keeping some of my inventory there. Too bad that the graphics trend seemed to ruin the series by causeing the worlds to become less complex (but prettier) .

Dani Bunten - Mule, Modem Wars, Seven Cities of Gold, etc, etc.

http://old.the-underdogs.org/Dani.htm

As for the OP suggestion of HSW, I just point you at what he''s doing today. One good game does not make you a "best" of anything.