Yuji Naka

Yuji Naka , is a video game designer, programmer, the former head of Sonic Team, a group of Sega programmers/designers, the lead programmer of the original Sonic the Hedgehog and the head of Prope.

After graduating high school, Naka decided to skip university and stay in his home town. During this time, Naka worked long hours at various menial jobs. After quitting his last job, Naka saw that Sega was looking for programming assistants. After a brief interview, he was hired and began working on a game called Girl’s Garden, which earned him critical praise and fan appreciation. He programmed the original Sonic the Hedgehog game, while Naoto Ōshima designed the character and Hirokazu Yasuhara designed the stages. Naka has also produced several other titles like Nights into Dreams…, Burning Rangers and Phantasy Star Online. In early games he was often credited as “YU2″ (in reference to Yu Suzuki) and “Muuu Yuji”. He is one of the few famous Japanese game creators to speak fluent English.

Naka also helped create a popular EyeToy game for the PlayStation 2 called Sega Superstars, and finds mention in Shadow the Hedgehog where GUN soldiers will occasionally call out “Mister Yuji Naka is all right” Yuji Naka has a cameo in Virtua Striker 3 along with Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Eggman, and a group of Chao.

In news released on March 16, 2006, Naka announced that he intended to create his own game studio, independent of Sega and Sega Studio USA. This decision bears resemblance to Naoto Oshima’s departure of Sonic Team in 1999, when he founded Artoon. And Hirokazu Yasuhara’s departure of Sonic Team in 2002, when he moved to Naughty Dog.

Corrinne Yu

Corrinne Yu

Corrinne Yu is a game programmer and currently Principal Engine Programmer on Microsoft’s Halo team, and first party Halo Lead. She is the first and only female Technical Lead of the whole of Microsoft Game Studios. She was a founding member of Microsoft’s Direct 3D Advisory Board. Previously she participated in CUDA and GPU simulation at NVidia. She continues to review the designs of new iterations of Direct3D.

Nintendo Tops the First “Top 50 Developers”

 

combining factors like game sales, Metacritic averages and developer feedback through Gamasutra – has concluded creating the first-ever Top 50 Developers list from Game Developer magazine. Coming in at the top of the list is, but of course, Nintendo’s Kyoto studio, followed by Infinity Ward, Blizzard, EA Canada, and Valve.

The top 20 are as follows, along with some of their notable 2007 releases:

Ken Kutaragi

 

Ken Kutaragi is the former Chairman and chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCEI), the video game division of Sony Corporation. He is known as “The Father of the PlayStation”, and its successors and spinoffs, including the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and the PlayStation 3.

Kutaragi was closely watched by financial analysts who trace profiles of the losses and profits of the Sony Corporation. This has been attributed to the PlayStation franchise’s high profit returns for Sony; it has been the key source of profit for the aforementioned parent corporation.

Ray Muzyka

Ray Muzyka is a medical doctor who founded BioWare Corporation with Greg Zeschuk in February 1995. When on 3rd November 2005 BioWare formed an alliance with Pandemic Studios, Ray Muzyka became a shareholder and senior executive of the BioWare/Pandemic Studios holding company.

Dr. Ray Muzyka is the General Manager, Chairman/CEO and Co-Executive Producer at BioWare Corp. He co-founded BioWare in 1995 with the other co-founder and President of BioWare, Dr. Greg Zeschuk. After selling BioWare to Electronic Arts in 2008, Muzyka became a Vice-President at EA in addition to his role at BioWare.

Muzyka and Zeschuk were the co-executive producers on Shattered Steel, the Baldur’s Gate series (PC), MDK2, MDK2: Armageddon, the Neverwinter Nights series, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox and PC), and Jade Empire (XBox). Muzyka and Zeschuk are also co-executive producers on the upcoming Dragon Age, an epic fantasy roleplaying game for PC set in a new BioWare-created universe, as well as Mass Effect, released in 2007, an Xbox 360 exclusive sci-fi action RPG based on another original BioWare intellectual property. BioWare is also selling content directly to its fans through the BioWare Community at www.bioware.com and store.bioware.com. BioWare also formed a new substudio based in Austin in late 2005, developing an as-yet-unannounced new MMO. BioWare and LucasArts announced a partnership in 2007.

Michael Morhaime

Michael Morhaime co-founded Silicon & Synapse (later named Blizzard Entertainment) in 1991 with Allen Adham and Frank Pearce.

he is the president and a co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, a video game developer located in Irvine, California and currently owned by the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi. He is also an alumnus of Triangle Fraternity and received his bachelor’s degree in 1990 from UCLA.

Morhaime appears in animated form in the South Park episode Make Love, Not Warcraft, which deals with the World of Warcraft MMORPG.

Brian Reynolds

Brian Reynolds  is a well known computer strategy game designer, formerly of MicroProse and Firaxis Games. He now runs his own game development company, Big Huge Games where he is CEO and creative director, and has been chairman of the International Game Developers Association. He has played a major part in designing a number of multi-million selling games including Civilization II and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

Reynolds was a gamer in high school, and a SysOp on Randolph School’s (Huntsville, Alabama) PDP-11 mainframe computer. A 1990 graduate of the University of the South, Reynolds briefly pursued graduate studies in Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. This influence is evident in the emphasis on philosophy encountered in one of his more famous computer games, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

Hideo Kojima

Hideo Kojima is a Japanese video game designer originally employed at Konami. Formerly the vice president of Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, he is currently the head of Kojima Productions, a new team devoted to creative game development leaving behind all the business and administrative decision making. He is the creator and director of a number of successful games, including the Metal Gear series, Snatcher, and Policenauts. He has also produced both the Zone of the Enders and Boktai series.

Idiosyncrasies of Kojima’s game design include intricate plots that grapple with philosophical and social issues in a dense and verbose fashion, from cloning and meme theory to the state of the military-industrial complex, as well as equally unique and often wacky approaches to game mechanics. In this regard, he has been deemed by some as a maker of so-called postmodern games; the Metal Gear series contains elements of magical realism and often breaks the fourth wall. His love of film is also noticeable in his games, where he pays homage through his stories and characters, sometimes to the point of pastiche, as in Snatcher. He is also well known for a quirky and somewhat irreverent sense of humor, and his frequently disarming and powerful plot twists.

Chris Sawyer

Chris Sawyer  is a Scottish computer game developer who is best-known for designing and programming RollerCoaster Tycoon, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, and Transport Tycoon. He entered the games industry in 1983, writing games in Z80 machine code on the Memotech MTX home computer, and then the Amstrad CPC series home computer. Some of these were published by Ariolasoft, Sepulcri Scelerati and Ziggurat. The former was a rare instance of a game being accepted by a publisher when it was already nearing completion. From 1988 to 1993, Chris Sawyer worked on PC conversions of Amiga games and was involved in many projects, including Virus, Campaign, Birds of Prey, Dino Dini’s Goal, and Frontier: Elite II. He also contributed to Elite Plus for the IBM PC.

Sawyer’s first management simulation game, Transport Tycoon, was released through Microprose in 1994 and became a classic of the modern tycoon computer games. A year later he improved and extended the game, giving it the title Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Sawyer immediately sought to create a sequel. However, while still working on the basic game engine, Sawyer developed an interest in roller coasters, and changed the project into what would become RollerCoaster Tycoon, originally called White Knuckle before release. ^[1] After creating RollerCoaster Tycoon, he resumed work on the sequel for Transport Tycoon but again postponed it to create RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. He completed the Transport Tycoon sequel for and released it as Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion in 2004.

Games Credited

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Soaked! (2005), Atari Europe S.A.S.U.
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Wild! (2005), Atari, Inc.
Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion (2004), Atari, Inc.
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (2004), Atari do Brasil Ltda.
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 (2002), Infogrames, Inc.
RollerCoaster Tycoon: Loopy Landscapes (2000), Hasbro Interactive, Inc.
RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999), Hasbro Interactive, Inc., MicroProse Software, Inc.
RollerCoaster Tycoon: Corkscrew Follies (1999), Hasbro Interactive, Inc.
Frontier: First Encounters (1995), GameTek, Inc.
Transport Tycoon Deluxe (1995), MicroProse Software, Inc.
Transport Tycoon World Editor (1995), MicroProse Software, Inc.
Dino Dini’s Soccer (1994), Virgin Interactive Entertainment (Europe) Ltd.
Transport Tycoon (1994), MicroProse Software, Inc.
Frontier: Elite II (1993), GameTek, Inc., Konami, Inc.
Goal! (1993), Virgin Games, Ltd.
Birds of Prey (1992), Electronic Arts, Inc.
Campaign (1992), Empire Software
Elite Plus (1991), Microplay Software
Conqueror (1990), Rainbow Arts Software GmbH
Xenomorph (1990), Pandora
Revenge of Defender (1989), Epyx, Inc.
Virus (1988), Firebird Software Ltd.

Jordan Mechner

Jordan Mechner is a game programmer, game designer, and movie director. Mechner was born in New York City and graduated from Yale University in 1985.

Mechner’s first hit game was Karateka (1984), written while he was still an undergraduate. Prince of Persia, released in 1989, was noted for its fluid animation of human figures. Both titles were published by Brøderbund. For the animations used in Prince of Persia, Mechner spent days studying videos and photographs of his brother David running and jumping and meticulously replicated the actions in the game.

In 1993, he formed Smoking Car Productions, an entertainment software development group based in San Francisco, to create The Last Express. While critically acclaimed, the game failed commercially, and Smoking Car Productions closed.

In 2003, Ubisoft released the fourth installment of the Prince of Persia saga, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, on which Mechner collaborated as writer and game designer. He was involved in name only with the fifth installment, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, which was a sequel to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The third and final chapter in the Sands of Time trilogy, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, was released in December 2005.

In regard to Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Mechner was quoted in the December 2005 issue of Wired Magazine as saying: “I’m not a fan of the artistic direction, or the violence that earned it an M rating. The story, character, dialog, voice acting, and visual style were not to my taste.”

Mechner today divides his time between writing screenplays and designing video games. He also wrote and directed two award-winning documentaries, Waiting for Dark and Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story.
Games Credited

Prince of Persia Classic (2007), Ubisoft Entertainment SA
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003), Ubisoft Entertainment SA
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003), Ubisoft Entertainment SA
Prince of Persia 3D (1999), Mattel Interactive
The Last Express (1997), Brøderbund Software, Inc.
4D Prince of Persia (1994),
Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow & The Flame (1993), Brøderbund Software, Inc.
D/Generation (1991), Mindscape, Inc.
Prince of Persia (1989), Brøderbund Software, Inc.
Karateka (1984), Brøderbund Software, Inc.