All the old and new developers/entrepreneurs who did what people said they could not do back then and now. In other words all the developers/entrepreneurs who taught themselves, dropped out or had an "irrelevant" education and therefore did not hold a knightly title like software engineer or CS graduated and still managed to make great stuff that would make the people with fine titles look like amateurs...

Gabe Newell, not for code, but because he understands the development process.

Every time I hear him talk, I am awe struck at how he thinks about how to get the most out of his talent pool.

Do you have any relevant interviews? I'm interested to hear some. I haven't heard him talk very much :/

Sure. I think

All the old and new developers/entrepreneurs who did what people said they could not do back then and now. In other words all the developers/entrepreneurs who taught themselves, dropped out or had an "irrelevant" education and therefore did not hold a knightly title like software engineer or CS graduated and still managed to make great stuff that would make the people with fine titles look like amateurs...

Ditto

I would have to say shigeru miyamoto the man and his characters were instrumental to most of my childhood and early teenage years. I have countless amazing memories with several of his titles and i am a massive mario fan to this day , to me Shigeru miyamoto is everything i aspire to be or produce as a game developer .

I also have to say my appreciation for peter molyneux comes and goes i was heartbroken in my teens when " project ego" managed to only be fable 1 but as i've gotten older, learned more about game development and my perspective on the series changes I feel like everytime i go back to fable the game seems just a bit more complete than it was last time. while by no means perfect i think it includes enough subsystems that makes the world one interesting cohesive universe but isn't quite as deep in terms of lore or things as skyrim or the witcher . It's weird but i appreciate peter molyneux some days and i loathe him others haha but i think about him enough that i can definitely say the titles he has worked on and spearheaded have impacted me substantially .

lLastly I would have to say the team at " The Behemoth" their games are so raw and so founded on the basis of being fun and addictive first and then wrapped in their own unique style that i can't help but imagine it has to be incredible to work on that team. sometimes it just seems like the fun they had in development oozes out of the monitor / tv. screen and i absorb it hungrily.

For me, I'd say Jun'ya Ota, better known as ZUN from Team Shanghai Alice, most famous for his Touhou Project series.

Hodgman. He seems to know something about everything and more often than not he knows everything about something.

An afternoon at the pub with Rob Conery would be interesting.

I have no "developer hero". Idolization is not really my thing. But I often find inspiration in other people's accounts and experiences. Nobody in particular though.

I have no "developer hero". Idolization is not really my thing. But I often find inspiration in other people's accounts and experiences. Nobody in particular though.

I certainly wouldn't say I idolize a developer, but I can understand having a developer hero. For me, it is probably Roberta Williams. Her games are pretty much what inspired me to go into the computing field.

For me it was more of 'mentorship'. I bought a lot of Andre books (tricks DOS and tricks Windows) and communicate through the forum a lot.