People

Ada Lovelace’s 1843 Notes explained Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine, including a procedure for Bernoulli numbers and possibilities beyond arithmetic. Her mathematical papers also preserve the work of learning to reason about it.

Allan Alcorn was Atari's first full-time engineer. Nolan Bushnell gave him a ping-pong game as a warm-up exercise in 1972, and the machine he built became Pong. He went on to run Atari's engineering, co-designed the home Pong chip, led the early work on the VCS, and later worked at Apple, where he was made an Apple Fellow.

Albert Charpentier headed the chip design group at MOS Technology. He designed the VIC video chip that became the heart of the VIC-20, led the 1981 project that produced the VIC-II and SID, and was the Commodore 64's chief designer, before leaving in 1983 to co-found Ensoniq.

Al Lowe taught school music, wrote children's programs on an Apple II in his evenings and sold them to Sierra On-Line in 1982, which hired him along with them. At Sierra he programmed and wrote music for its Disney games, King's Quest and Police Quest, then created Leisure Suit Larry in 1987 and wrote six Larry games, Freddy Pharkas and Torin's Passage. Sierra stopped the eighth Larry and let him go in February 1999; he returned for a Kickstarter remake of the first game in 2013.

A researcher at the Computer Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris on an Electronika 60 in the mid-1980s, 1984 by most accounts, and saw it sold around the world by other people while the rights belonged to the Soviet state. He moved to the United States in 1991, designed puzzle games for Microsoft including Hexic, and co-founded The Tetris Company with Henk Rogers.

Allister Brimble’s route into game music ran through Amiga demos and 17 Bit’s public-domain disks. His interviews explain how composition changed with the tools, sample memory and sound channels available.

A Swedish programmer who went from writing Amiga music software sold through 17-Bit Software's public-domain library to coding Team17's early hits: Full Contact, Alien Breed, Project-X, Superfrog and Alien Breed II. He was part of Team 7, with Peter Tuleby and the artist Rico Holmes, and worked from Sweden for a company based in Wakefield.

Andrew Braybrook left a programming job at Marconi in 1983 to work with Steve Turner, and on the Commodore 64 wrote Gribbly's Day Out, Paradroid, Uridium and Alleykat for Hewson, then Morpheus and Intensity for Telecomsoft. The diaries he kept for ZZAP!64 while writing Paradroid and Morpheus let readers watch a commercial game being built, day by day.

Andrew Deakin wrote Spectrum games for Ocean and its Imagine label from 1987, almost always with the artist Ivan Horn: Athena, Combat School (with Mike Lamb), Operation Wolf, Rambo III, Renegade III, RoboCop 2 and The Addams Family. His conversion of Taito's Operation Wolf was a CRASH Smash and topped the charts at Christmas 1988, and in 1989 a CRASH reader ranking Ocean's staff put him second, behind Mike Lamb.

A radiocarbon scientist who wrote Hints & Tips for the ZX-80, founded Hewson Consultants on £500 in 1980, answered Sinclair User readers' technical questions every month from 1982 to 1988, and published Steve Turner, Andrew Braybrook, Raffaele Cecco and John Phillips under their own names. After losing Graftgold to Telecomsoft in a 1987 court fight and Hewson to receivership in 1991, he ran 21st Century Entertainment, publisher of Pinball Dreams, and in 2016 told his story in Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers.

Andy Davidson wrote Total Wormage on his own Amiga, mostly in Blitz Basic, while doing his A-levels and working in a computer shop in Bournemouth. After a magazine competition passed it over, he showed it to Team17 at the 1994 ECTS and was offered a deal within five minutes. Worms came out in 1995; he worked on its sequels until Worms Armageddon, returned to Team17 in 2012, and in 2026 released a new expansion for the Amiga's Worms: The Director's Cut.

Anita Sinclair set up Magnetic Scrolls in London in 1984 with Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers, and as its public face and one of its programmers she took The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Corruption and Fish! to the top of the adventure awards. She was in her early twenties, in a business the press described as almost entirely male. Since the 2010s she has been one of England's most successful women bridge players.

Annie Easley worked at the Cleveland laboratory that became NASA Lewis, then Glenn. Her account follows human calculation, punched cards and scientific programming, including work on energy research and launch vehicles.

Barbara Liskov helped establish data abstraction as a practical way to organise programs. Her work also underpins the Liskov Substitution Principle, the L in SOLID, which asks whether a subtype preserves the behaviour its users expect.

Ben Daglish wrote music for Commodore 64 games from his teens: first with Tony Crowther as W.E.M.U.S.I.C., then as Gremlin Graphics' in-house composer from 1987. He wrote the main themes of System 3's The Last Ninja, with Anthony Lees writing the loading music, and scores for Trap, Auf Wiedersehen Monty and many more. He left games in the early 1990s, played his old tunes at retro events for years afterwards, and died in 2018.

Bernie Drummond had never seen a computer game when Jon Ritman sat him in front of Knight Lore and handed him a home-made drawing program. He went on to draw every graphic in Ocean's Batman (1986), Head Over Heels and Match Day II, and later Rare's Game Boy game Monster Max. CRASH's readers called him the number one Spectrum artist. He died in 2021.

Bill Mensch co-designed the 6502 and founded Western Design Center. His work connects the original NMOS processor to later CMOS designs and the 16-bit 65C816 family.

Bo Jangeborg came to London in 1985 to sign a contract for his Spectrum art program, The Artist, meaning to stay a week. He stayed seven months and wrote Fairlight, which CRASH gave 95%, on a room-drawing system of his own called Grax. After Fairlight II and The Artist II he left The Edge on bad terms, shelved his next game, and wrote Flash!, the graphics program given away with the SAM Coupé.

A former mainframe computer operator from Swansea, Bob Pape wrote the Spectrum versions of Rampage (1987) and R-Type (1988), the conversion magazines had expected to be impossible. Twenty-five years later he published It's Behind You, a frank first-hand account of how the game was commissioned, paid for and finished.

Bob Wakelin was a Liverpool-based illustrator who painted the cassette inlays and advertisements for Ocean Software from its first games in 1984 into the 1990s, and for its Imagine label: Daley Thompson's Decathlon, Wizball, Batman, Gryzor, Operation Wolf, Firefly, The New Zealand Story and many more. He had no interest in computer games, wanted to draw comics, and painted in pencil and airbrush. He died in January 2018.

Bob Yannes joined MOS Technology in 1979, built the first VIC-20 prototype and designed the Commodore 64's SID sound chip as a small music synthesiser. He left Commodore around the turn of 1983 and co-founded Ensoniq, whose Mirage sampler he designed.

Brian Fargo sold his first adventure game by hand in the early 1980s, founded Interplay Productions in 1983 and co-designed The Bard's Tale II and Wasteland. As Interplay's head he published Battle Chess, Descent, Fallout and Baldur's Gate. He left in 2002, founded inXile Entertainment, crowdfunded Wasteland 2 in 2012 and sold the studio to Microsoft in 2018.

Brian Howarth wrote the Mysterious Adventures, beginning with The Golden Baton, and helped bring Scott Adams's adventures to British micros. A reusable program let him separate each adventure's data from the code that ran it.

The programmer known as byuu, and later as Near, began the Super NES emulator bsnes in 2004 to reproduce the console's hardware timing rather than patch games into working. bsnes, renamed higan in 2012, ran the whole commercial SNES library; Near also bought and scanned the library for preservation, raised money to have the console's coprocessors decapped, and made fan translations from Der Langrisser to Bahamut Lagoon. Near died in 2021 after a long campaign of online harassment.

Carol Shaw programmed games at Atari and Activision, including the Atari 2600 River Raid. She also worked on larger computers at Tandem. Her interviews and surviving design papers show how display hardware, memory and other people's suggestions shaped her games.

Charles Cecil wrote text adventures for Artic Computing while still a student, ran development at US Gold and at Activision in Europe, and in 1990 co-founded Revolution Software, which made Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series. He was still designing adventures for Revolution more than thirty years later, and was appointed MBE in 2011.

Chris Anderson edited Personal Computer Games, put together the first issues of ZZAP!64 for Newsfield in 1985, and later that year started Future Publishing in Somerset with one magazine, Amstrad Action. He sold Future to Pearson in 1994, built a magazine company in the United States, and later took over the TED conference.

Chris Avellone wrote tabletop role-playing supplements before Interplay hired him in the mid-1990s. He led the design of Black Isle's Planescape: Torment (1999), co-founded Obsidian Entertainment in 2003 and led Knights of the Old Republic II, then worked freelance from 2015. In 2020 allegations of sexual misconduct led studios to drop him; his libel suit against two accusers was settled in 2023, when they stated that he had never sexually abused them.

Chris Butler’s C64 conversions include Commando and Ghosts ’n Goblins. His contemporary interview describes learning the machine, choosing display methods and working towards an arcade game’s defined target.

A physics teacher turned Atari programmer, Chris Crawford wrote Eastern Front (1941), much of the Atari technical guide De Re Atari, and The Art of Computer Game Design (1984). As a freelancer he made Balance of Power (1985), started the Journal of Computer Game Design and, in 1988, the conference that became the Game Developers Conference. In 1992 he ended a speech at that conference by charging out of the room, and spent the next three decades on interactive storytelling.

Chris Hülsbeck won a Commodore 64 music competition in the German magazine 64'er at 17, joined Rainbow Arts, and wrote the music for The Great Giana Sisters, X-Out and the Turrican games. His Amiga sound system, TFMX, was sold to other programmers in 1990. He moved to the United States to work for Factor 5 in the late 1990s and has since funded orchestral albums of his game music through Kickstarter.

Chris Metzen joined Blizzard as an animator around 1994, talked his way on to Warcraft II as a 'designer' by writing its backstory, and spent the next two decades building the histories of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo, and voicing Thrall. He retired in 2016, started a tabletop games company, and returned to Blizzard in 2022 to lead the Warcraft series' creative direction.

Chris Roberts grew up in Manchester and wrote BBC Micro games for Imagine, Ocean and Superior Software before moving to Origin Systems in Texas, where he made Times of Lore, Bad Blood and Wing Commander. He directed the filmed Wing Commander III and IV, founded Digital Anvil, directed the 1999 Wing Commander film and produced Hollywood films, then returned to games in 2012 with Cloud Imperium Games and the crowdfunded Star Citizen.

Chris Sawyer wrote games for the Memotech MTX and Amstrad CPC as a teenager and student, then spent five years converting other people's Amiga games to the PC, among them Elite Plus and Frontier: Elite II. From 1994 he wrote his own: Transport Tycoon, RollerCoaster Tycoon and its sequel, and Locomotion, programming each himself in x86 assembly language while artists and composers supplied the graphics and music. He later sued Atari over royalties, returned to remake his games for phones, and sold Transport Tycoon to Atari in 2024.

A schoolboy from Wallasey who answered David Ward's advert for programs, Christian Urquhart wrote Ocean's Spectrum Hunchback while sitting his O-levels, then Cavelon and, with Paul Owens, Daley Thompson's Decathlon. He moved to Gremlin Graphics, co-founded Alphabatim to publish Robot Messiah, and was still converting arcade games for the Spectrum in 1988.

Chuck Peddle led the team that designed MOS Technology's 6502, the $25 processor inside the Apple II, the PET, the Atari machines and, in variant form, the Commodore 64 and the NES. At Commodore he turned the 6502 into the PET, and later he designed the Victor 9000.

A Manchester mechanical engineer who taught himself machine code after buying a ZX81, and the programmer at the centre of Vortex Software. From Android 2 in 1984 to Revolution in 1986 every game he wrote was in 3D, each drawn a different way, and CRASH scored his Spectrum games from Android 2 to Deflektor between 77% and 95%.

Dale Luck joined Amiga Corporation in 1983 from Hewlett-Packard to take charge of the graphics software. He wrote the Amiga's graphics and layers libraries, asked Jay Miner for the blitter's line-drawing mode, and with RJ Mical wrote the Boing Ball demo. After Commodore let the original team go, he started Boing! and GfxBase, selling an optical mouse and the X Window System for the Amiga.

A would-be comic artist who answered a Palace Software advert for a "2000AD style artist" in the mid-1980s, designed The Sacred Armour of Antiriad and drew its comic, then joined the Bitmap Brothers around 1990 as the artist on Speedball 2, Cadaver and The Chaos Engine. He has worked as a freelance games artist since.

A Stanford mechanical engineer who had written a paint program at Xerox, Dan Silva joined Electronic Arts at its start and wrote Deluxe Paint for the Amiga in 1985, then Deluxe Paint II and III, the version that added animation. He left EA to go freelance around 1990.

Dani Bunten Berry designed M.U.L.E. (1983), a trading game for four players at one computer, and Seven Cities of Gold (1984), both for Electronic Arts. When families would not gather round the computer, she connected computers instead, with Modem Wars (1988), Command HQ and Global Conquest. She published her early games as Dan Bunten, transitioned in 1992, received the Computer Game Developers Association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998 and died of lung cancer that July, aged 49.

A former Timex apprentice from Dundee, David Jones founded DMA Design in 1988, programmed Menace and Lemmings, and ran the studio that made Grand Theft Auto. He later founded Realtime Worlds, which made Crackdown and went into administration weeks after APB's launch in 2010, and the cloud-computing company Cloudgine.

P. David Lebling wrote the parser that started Zork at MIT's Dynamic Modelling Group in 1977, invented the grue, and drew the line that cut the mainframe game into Infocom's Zork I. A founder of Infocom in 1979, he co-wrote the Zork trilogy and Enchanter with Marc Blank and wrote Starcross, Suspect, Spellbreaker, The Lurking Horror and James Clavell's Shogun on his own. After Infocom closed its Cambridge studio in 1989 he stayed in Massachusetts and worked in software outside games.

Dave Rogers wrote the music and sound effects for Raffaele Cecco's Hewson games, Cybernoid, Cybernoid II, Stormlord and Deliverance, working from home on an Amstrad CPC and a guitar and posting the results on cassette. Two of his Cybernoid tunes were in CRASH's first readers' music chart in February 1989.

A psychology graduate who joined Atari's coin-op division in the late 1970s, Dave Theurer designed and programmed Missile Command (1980), Tempest (1981) and I, Robot, an arcade game drawn with solid, shaded 3D polygons. Missile Command gave him nightmares about nuclear attack for months afterwards. He left Atari Games in 1990 to write the graphics tool DeBabelizer, and received the Game Developers Choice Pioneer Award in 2012.

David Braben wrote Elite with Ian Bell while both were undergraduates at Jesus College, Cambridge, and Acornsoft launched it in September 1984. He went on to write Zarch for the Acorn Archimedes, its conversion Virus, and Frontier: Elite II, which he programmed largely alone. In 1994 he set up Frontier Developments in Cambridge, whose first game, Frontier: First Encounters, was released by GameTek in 1995 in a state that led to years of litigation. Frontier went on to make RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, LostWinds and Kinectimals, returned to Elite with the Kickstarter-funded Elite Dangerous, and joined the stock market in 2013. Braben also co-founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and was appointed OBE in 2014.

An electronics engineer from Indiana who became an Atari VCS programmer, David Crane co-founded Activision in 1979 and designed Freeway, Pitfall!, Decathlon, Ghostbusters and Little Computer People there, then A Boy and His Blob for the NES at Absolute Entertainment.

David Ahl, an engineer and market researcher, ran educational marketing for Digital Equipment Corporation in the early 1970s, collected the games its customers sent in and published them as 101 BASIC Computer Games (1973). He founded Creative Computing in 1974, edited it until Ziff-Davis closed it in 1985, and republished the games for microcomputers as BASIC Computer Games (1978), one of the best-selling computer books of its time. He later published Atari Explorer, then military vehicle magazines.

David Jones wrote the four Magic Knight arcade adventures for Mastertronic between 1985 and 1987: Finders Keepers at £1.99, then Spellbound, Knight Tyme and Stormbringer at £2.99. Their menu-driven interface let players command other characters, and CRASH made both Spellbound and Knight Tyme Smashes.

A self-taught Liverpool programmer who wrote Spectrum, BBC Micro and VIC-20 games for Bug-Byte, left in 1982 to found Imagine with Mark Butler and wrote its first hit, Arcadia, led the doomed megagame project, and then designed and coded Psygnosis's early 16-bit games, including Barbarian and Obliterator, before setting up his own developer, Kinetica, in 1990.

A schoolboy from County Antrim whose type-in listings got him a job at Mikro-Gen at 17, David Perry wrote Wally games on the Spectrum, conversions and originals at Probe, and Mega Drive hits for Virgin in California, including Aladdin. He founded Shiny Entertainment, which made Earthworm Jim and MDK, and later co-founded the cloud gaming service Gaikai, which Sony bought in 2012.

A Commodore salesman from 1983 who became joint managing director of Commodore UK in 1993, launched the CD32 in Britain, and after Commodore's collapse in 1994 led a management buyout bid for the company and the Amiga. He blamed Commodore's president Mehdi Ali for its failure, withdrew from the auction in April 1995, and later wrote a book about his years at the company.

A schoolboy from Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire who taught himself machine code on a borrowed Commodore PET, was handed a pre-production Commodore 64 and wrote Simons' BASIC for it: 114 new commands, sold by Commodore as a cartridge from 1983, with a follow-up Extension in 1984.

David Whittaker taught himself to program on a VIC-20 in 1982, wrote and scored Lazy Jones for the Commodore 64, and became one of the busiest game composers of the 1980s, writing for the Spectrum, C64, Amiga and Atari ST from Binary Design and then his own company, Musicon Design. By 1990 he counted more than 400 soundtracks. His Amiga music for Xenon 2 and Shadow of the Beast topped readers' charts. He moved to the United States in 1993 to work for Electronic Arts, and later ran the audio department at Traveller's Tales.

David Wise was demonstrating a Yamaha music computer in a shop when Tim and Chris Stamper heard his demo tunes and offered him work. From 1985 he wrote music for dozens of Rare's NES and Game Boy games, Battletoads among them, then most of Donkey Kong Country and its sequel on the Super Nintendo, using a sampling trick borrowed from a Korg synthesiser. He left Rare in 2009 and went freelance, returning to the series for Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze.

Derek Brewster wrote Spectrum games, among them Velnor's Lair, Codename MAT, Kentilla and Jasper, and for 45 issues from May 1984 ran CRASH's Adventure Trail column, often in the same magazines that reviewed his games. He left CRASH at the end of 1987 to co-found the budget publisher Zeppelin Games in Newcastle, which later became Eutechnyx.

Derek Yu, an American designer and artist born in 1982, made the freeware platform game Eternal Daughter with a friend, took over the independent games site TIGSource, co-created the 2007 Independent Games Festival winner Aquaria, and in 2008 released Spelunky. His company, Mossmouth, followed it with the Xbox 360 Spelunky, Spelunky 2 and UFO 50, a collection of fifty games from an imaginary 1980s company.

Dino Dini wrote Kick Off (1989), Player Manager (1990) and Kick Off 2 (1990) for Anco, top-down football games in which the ball ran loose from the player's feet. He left Anco for Virgin Games, which published his Goal! in 1993, later worked in the United States, taught game programming in the Netherlands, and returned to the series with Kick Off Revival in 2016.

Dominic Robinson’s Spectrum demos led to work at Hewson and conversions including Uridium. His signed Zynaps account explains the development tools and timing decisions behind a finished scrolling game.

A teacher who came to computers in his forties, Don Priestley wrote Mazogs and Dictator for the ZX81, was a director of DK'Tronics, and made his name with huge, clash-free cartoon characters on the Spectrum: Popeye (1985), Trap Door (1986), Flunky and Through the Trap Door (1987) and Gregory Loses His Clock (1989). He left games in 1989, went back to teaching, and died in 2024 aged 84.

Dona Bailey left a job programming Cadillac engine computers for Atari's coin-op division in 1980, where she was the only woman programmer. Her first game, made with Ed Logg, was Centipede. She left Atari in 1982, left the games industry a few years later, and returned to Arkansas, where from 2008 she taught in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's Department of Rhetoric and Writing.

Dorothy Vaughan supervised West Area Computing at NACA Langley and later programmed in FORTRAN. Her career follows the people who calculated research results as their organisation and equipment changed.

Doug Neubauer designed Atari’s POKEY and wrote Star Raiders. His accounts connect a multi-purpose I/O chip, a tightly constrained game and later work on the Atari 2600.

Ed Boon programmed pinball tables at Williams in Chicago, moved into its video game department, and in 1992 made Mortal Kombat with John Tobias. He is the voice of Scorpion's "Get over here!", led the series after Tobias left Midway, and has run it at Warner Bros.' NetherRealm Studios since Midway's collapse, alongside the Injustice games.

Ed Logg joined Atari's coin-op division in 1978 and apart from a spell at Electronic Arts, stayed with it and its successors until 2003. He wrote Super Breakout and Asteroids, made Centipede with Dona Bailey, followed it with Millipede, and designed Gauntlet for Atari Games before turning to NES, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 2 games. In 2012 he received the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences' Pioneer Award.

Eiji Aonuma joined Nintendo as a designer in 1988. After directing a Zelda-like Super Famicom game, Marvelous, he was asked by Shigeru Miyamoto to design the dungeons of Ocarina of Time. He directed Majora's Mask and The Wind Waker, directed and produced Twilight Princess, and has produced the series since, including Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Éric Chahi sold his first Oric game at sixteen, drew the art for Future Wars at Delphine, then made Another World (1991) almost alone on an Amiga 500. His studio Amazing spent six years on Heart of Darkness (1998). He then stepped away to photograph, paint and study volcanoes, and came back with the god game From Dust (Ubisoft, 2011) and the virtual-reality Paper Beast (Pixel Reef, 2020).

A former astronomer living in the mountains of New Mexico, Eric Graham wrote his first ray tracer in 1966 and waited twenty years for a computer that could show its pictures. On an Amiga in late 1986 he made The Juggler, a 24-frame loop of a robot juggling mirrored balls, then turned his renderer into Sculpt 3D, sold by Byte by Byte from the summer of 1987.

Eric W. Schwartz, an American student based in Ohio, made short cartoons on an Amiga from 1989 with Deluxe Paint and MovieSetter and gave them away through public-domain libraries and bulletin boards. Amy the Squirrel, Flip the Frog and the Anti-Lemmin' demo made him, in Amiga Format's words, the 'king of PD animations'. Since 1996 he has drawn the web comic Sabrina Online.

Eugene Jarvis programmed pinball tables at Atari and Williams, then designed Defender, Williams's first video game. With Larry DeMar he formed Vid Kidz and made Stargate, Robotron: 2084 and Blaster. Back at Williams he made NARC, Smash TV and the Cruis'n driving games, and in 2000 he set up Raw Thrills, one of the last American companies still building arcade machines.

Federico Faggin, a physicist from Vicenza, developed Fairchild's silicon-gate process in 1968, led the design of Intel's 4004 microprocessor and its successors, conceived the 8080, and in 1974 left Intel to found Zilog, where he and Masatoshi Shima created the Z80. He later founded Cygnet Technologies and Synaptics, which introduced the laptop touchpad, ran the image-sensor company Foveon, and turned to the study of consciousness.

François Lionet co-wrote STOS, the Atari ST game-making BASIC that topped the Gallup ST chart in 1988, then wrote AMOS for the Amiga, finishing it during his French military service. In 1994 he moved to the PC with Klik & Play, co-founded Clickteam with Yves Lamoureux, and later returned to AMOS with AOZ Studio.

Gargaj, the Hungarian coder and musician Gergely Szelei, contributed to Conspiracy's Chaos Theory and built tools including Bonzomatic and Wuhu. His scene work also includes organising Function and maintaining Pouët.

Gary Mays co-founded PSS in Coventry in 1981 with Richard Cockayne and ran it as managing director. He defended Theatre Europe's nuclear war against CND's charge of bad taste, having begun as a CND supporter himself, and joined Mirrorsoft's new Image Works label as operations manager in 1988.

A defence systems engineer who taught himself assembly language on a BBC Micro, Geoff Crammond wrote the Spitfire simulator Aviator and the Formula 3 simulation Revs for Acornsoft, then The Sentinel and Stunt Car Racer, and from 1991 the Formula One Grand Prix series for MicroProse, ending with Grand Prix 4 in 2002.

Grace Hopper programmed Harvard’s Mark I and led work on UNIVAC programming tools. Reusable routines, FLOW-MATIC and language standards connected her practical work with the development and use of COBOL.

Graeme Devine wrote Spectrum games as a teenager, converted Pole Position for Atari and Ballblazer for Activision, and moved to America in 1988 to help set up Mastertronic's office there. With Rob Landeros he founded Trilobyte, whose The 7th Guest (1993) became the CD-ROM game people bought drives to play. He later designed at id Software and Ensemble Studios, and worked at Apple and Magic Leap.

A systems analyst who wrote The Quill, the adventure writing system that let people who could not program write and sell text adventures, and later worked on Gilsoft's PAW and S.W.A.N. He died in January 2025.

A Scottish-born, Yorkshire-raised trumpeter and rock guitarist, Grant Kirkhope joined Rare in 1995 after sending it tape after tape. He wrote much of GoldenEye 007's music, scored Banjo-Kazooie with music that changed instruments as the player moved, and went on to Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark and Viva Piñata before leaving for the United States in 2008, where he scored Kingdoms of Amalur and the Mario + Rabbids games.

Greg Follis spent about fifteen years in business computing before he and Roy Carter founded Gargoyle Games in Dudley in 1984. He drew the pictures and came up with most of the ideas for Tir Na Nog, Dun Darach, Marsport and Heavy on the Magick, while Carter wrote the code. By 1989 the pair were selling business software for the PC.

Hired to maintain Nintendo's card-making machines, Gunpei Yokoi made its first toy hit, the Ultra Hand, then led the team behind Game & Watch, the cross-shaped D-pad and the Game Boy. After the Virtual Boy failed he left Nintendo in 1996 and founded Koto, which designed Bandai's WonderSwan. He was killed in a road accident in October 1997, aged 56.

Henk Nieborg met the Austrian programmer Erwin Kloibhofer through the demo scene. Together they made Ghost Battle and Lionheart (1993) for Thalion, then The Misadventures of Flink (1994) for Psygnosis on the Mega Drive and The Adventures of Lomax (1996) for the PlayStation. Later he drew for WayForward's Shantae games and, in 2019, the Mega Drive game Xeno Crisis.

A Dutch-born games publisher in Japan, Henk Rogers brought the role-playing game to Japanese computers with The Black Onyx, published Tetris for the Famicom, and in February 1989 went to Moscow unannounced to win the handheld rights for his company, Bullet-Proof Software, which sublicensed them to Nintendo for the Game Boy. He later brought Alexey Pajitnov to America, co-founded The Tetris Company, and has run the Tetris business ever since.

Hideo Kojima joined Konami's MSX team as a planner in 1986, and in 1987 made Metal Gear, a war game about avoiding the enemy, because the machine could not handle a shooting game. He went on to the cyberpunk adventures Snatcher and Policenauts, brought Metal Gear back on the PlayStation in 1998, and left Konami in 2015 to run Kojima Productions as an independent studio, which made Death Stranding (2019) and Death Stranding 2 (2025).

Hirokazu 'Hip' Tanaka joined Nintendo in 1980 to design sound for arcade machines, built Donkey Kong's sound effects from circuits, wrote the music for Metroid, Kid Icarus and the Game Boy Tetris, and helped design the Game Boy's sound hardware. He co-wrote the music for Mother and EarthBound, planned the Game Boy Camera, left Nintendo for Creatures in 1999 and was its president from 2001 to 2023.

Hironobu Sakaguchi joined Square as a part-time designer in 1983, directed the first five Final Fantasy games and produced the series through Final Fantasy VII and beyond. He directed Square's film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which lost heavily, left the company, and in 2004 founded Mistwalker, which made Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey for Microsoft, The Last Story for Nintendo and Fantasian for Apple Arcade.

Hiroshi Yamauchi became president of Nintendo, then a Kyoto playing-card company, in 1949, while still a law student. He tried instant rice, a taxi firm and a love hotel, then turned Nintendo into a maker of toys and video games, pushing through the Game & Watch, the Famicom and the Game Boy. He never played video games, but he alone decided which ones Nintendo released. He retired in 2002 and died in 2013.

A Seattle banking lawyer who had never registered a trademark when Minoru Arakawa asked him to protect Donkey Kong, Howard Lincoln told Universal's president to his face that Nintendo would not settle, joined Nintendo of America as its number two, fought Atari Games over Tengen and Tetris, spoke for Nintendo at the 1993 Senate hearings on violent games, and ran the company as chairman before sixteen years in charge of the Seattle Mariners.

Howard Scott Warshaw joined Atari in 1981 and wrote three Atari 2600 games that came out in 1982: the best-selling original Yars' Revenge, the ambitious Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, written in about five weeks. He left Atari in 1984, made the documentary series Once Upon Atari, and became a licensed psychotherapist in Silicon Valley.

A Reading postcard dealer who taught himself BASIC on one of the first ZX81s, wrote Mined-Out for Quicksilva in 1983, and founded Incentive Software that August. He ran Incentive through the Graphic Adventure Creator and the Freescape games, and went on to head its sister company Dimension International, which became the virtual reality firm Superscape.

Ian Bell was a mathematics undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, when he and David Braben wrote Elite, launched by Acornsoft in 1984. He had already written Freefall for Acornsoft, converted Elite to other 6502 machines, and later left the commercial games industry. His website has offered the original Elite, its manual and, since 2024, sources for several versions.

Financial director of Imagine Software when it was wound up in 1984, Ian Hetherington carried its unfinished megagame into a new Liverpool company, Psygnosis. He ran its development side while Jonathan Ellis ran the business, backed Amiga showpieces and outside teams such as DMA Design and Reflections, and sold the company to Sony in 1993. After leaving in 1998 he co-founded Evolution Studios and chaired Realtime Worlds. He died in December 2021.

Ian Logan was a family doctor near Lincoln who took apart the ROMs of the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum and published what he found, most famously in The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly with Frank O'Hara. From December 1982 he worked for Sinclair Research on the software in the ZX Interface 1's shadow ROM.

A mathematician, climber and computer-services executive, Ian McNaught-Davis was the expert on the BBC's The Computer Programme (1982), with Chris Serle as the layman. He went on to present Making the Most of the Micro and Micro Live. In 1956 he was one of four climbers who made the first ascent of the Muztagh Tower in the Karakoram.

iq (Íñigo Quílez) is a Spanish graphics programmer who learnt his craft making demos from 1998. With the group Rgba he made 4K intros and images that rendered whole scenes from formulas, co-created Elevated, then built procedural scenery at Pixar and, with Pol Jeremias, turned Shadertoy into a website.

Ivan Horn drew the Spectrum graphics for a run of Ocean and Imagine games from 1987 to 1992, almost always with the programmer Andrew Deakin: Athena, Combat School, Operation Wolf, Rambo III, Renegade III, Operation Thunderbolt, RoboCop 2 and The Addams Family. Before that he had written budget games of his own. In 1989 a CRASH reader ranking Ocean's staff put him third.

An Auschwitz survivor who started with typewriters and adding machines, Jack Tramiel built Commodore into the maker of the PET, VIC-20 and Commodore 64, fought the 1983 home computer price war, resigned in January 1984 and bought Atari's consumer business that July.

Jay Miner designed the graphics chip in Atari's VCS and led the chip design for the Atari 400 and 800. When Atari would not build a 68000 machine, he quit, and at the start-up that became Amiga he led the team that designed the Amiga's custom chips.

Jeff Minter (born 1962) founded Llamasoft in Tadley, Hampshire, in 1982, and made his name with Gridrunner on the VIC-20 and Attack of the Mutant Camels on the Commodore 64. He wrote a column for Zzap!64 from its first issue, built interactive 'light synthesisers' from Psychedelia onwards, and wrote Tempest 2000 for Atari's Jaguar in 1994. He was still releasing games as Llamasoft decades later.

Jeff Smart was a Commodore 64 swapper and cracker in West Germany who edited Illegal, a photocopied paper fanzine about the cracking scene, from January 1986 to its last issue in December 1991. In 1988, while he was a member of the Swedish group Triad, Commodore User described the fanzine to British readers and printed a letter he signed from Triad.

Jeroen Tel was a teenager in the Netherlands when he and Charles Deenen formed Maniacs of Noise to write music and sound effects for Commodore 64 games. Tel wrote the C64 music for Hewson's Cybernoid and Stormlord, System 3's Myth and US Gold's Turbo Out Run, used sampled sound in his tunes, and went on to write for the Amiga, Nintendo's consoles and handhelds, and later games, while performing and remixing his C64 music.

A Danish composer who wrote Amiga demo music for Kefrens and The Silents, including the score for Hardwired. He was the in-house musician at the Copenhagen developer Zyrinx on Sub-Terrania, stayed in New York when the team went home, and scored IO Interactive's Hitman games, four Assassin's Creed games and the Borderlands series. Hitman: Contracts won him a BAFTA in 2005.

Jester is the German musician Volker Tripp, who wrote tracker music on the Amiga from 1990 and much of the music for the demo group Sanity, including the World of Commodore demo and Roots. His 1992 music disk Jesterday was sold by British public-domain libraries, and in 1993 he released a cassette of pop songs made with his Amiga.

Jez San began trading as Argonaut in 1982, at sixteen, and wrote the Atari ST hit Starglider (Rainbird, 1986). Its royalties turned Argonaut into a real company. After his team got 3D running on the Game Boy, he proposed a 3D chip to Nintendo: the Super FX, which powered Star Fox. He was appointed OBE in 2002, went on to online poker with PKR after Argonaut collapsed in 2004, and revived the Argonaut name in 2024.

Jim Bagley got his first games job at 17, in 1986, and at Liverpool's Special FX became the only programmer on eleven games Ocean published, among them the Spectrum and Amstrad versions of Cabal and Midnight Resistance. He later converted Doom to the Sega Saturn, and since 2017 has helped design and program the ZX Spectrum Next.

Jim Butterfield learnt machine language on a telecoms company's computer in 1964, rediscovered it on a KIM-1, and from 1981 made a living explaining Commodore computers: through his COMPUTE! column, which ran from 1980 to 1985, his Brady book Machine Language for the Commodore 64, the Supermon monitor he tidied and gave away, and years of talks at the Toronto PET Users Group. He died in Toronto in 2007.

Jim Sachs left the US Air Force, taught himself machine code on a Commodore 64 and wrote Saucer Attack, then became the Amiga's best-known artist as art director of Cinemaware's Defender of the Crown (1986). He went on to draw Ports of Call for Aegis, Commodore's CDTV and CD32 start-up screens and Defender of the Crown II, and later wrote the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium screensaver.

A co-founder of id Software in 1991, John Carmack wrote the scrolling for Commander Keen and the 3D engines of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. He explained his methods in public, released the source code of id's older engines, built rockets at Armadillo Aerospace, left id in 2013 to become chief technology officer of Oculus VR, and in 2022 founded Keen Technologies to work on artificial intelligence.

The New York trial lawyer who defended Nintendo when Universal City Studios claimed Donkey Kong infringed King Kong, won the case and its counterclaims, and went on to fight Nintendo's battles over licensing, Tengen and Tetris. Nintendo thanked him with a sailboat called Donkey Kong.

A co-founder of id Software in 1991, John Romero programmed and designed Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, wrote the tools id built Doom with, designed many of Doom's levels and named its DeathMatch mode. He left id after Quake in 1996 to found Ion Storm, whose Daikatana arrived in 2000 years late and to poor reviews. He has since run several studios, including Romero Games in Ireland, and returned to Doom with the Sigil episodes.

John Tobias drew his first video game, Smash TV, at Williams, then made Mortal Kombat with Ed Boon: he designed much of its cast, wrote the stories that tied the fighters together, and led the Sub-Zero spin-off Mythologies. He left Midway in 1999, founded Studio Gigante, and later worked at Zynga and Warner Bros. Games.

John Twiddy made his name converting CRL's Tau Ceti to the Commodore 64, wrote Thalamus's Cyberload tape protection, and programmed The Last Ninja and Last Ninja 2 for System 3. In 1988 he co-founded Vivid Image with Mev Dinc and Hugh Riley; in the 1990s he brought Virgin's Mega Drive games Global Gladiators, Cool Spot and Aladdin to the Amiga, and programmed System 3's Putty Squad, whose Amiga version was released in 2013.

A former TV engineer from Rochdale who became Your Sinclair's champion adventure solver, wrote comic Quill adventures such as Behind Closed Doors, and ran Zenobi Software by post from his home, publishing more than 200 adventures by dozens of authors. He returned to writing in his seventies and died in 2021.

Jon Hare co-founded Sensible Software with his school friend Chris Yates in 1986. He drew the graphics and led the design of Wizball, MicroProse Soccer, Mega-lo-Mania, Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder, and co-wrote Cannon Fodder's theme song. After Codemasters bought Sensible in 1999 he worked for Codemasters, then set up Tower Studios, and in the 2010s and 2020s he returned to overhead football with Sociable Soccer.

Jon Ritman was a television engineer who bought a ZX81 in 1982 and within months had a game on sale. After a string of Artic games he wrote Match Day with Chris Clarke, then, with the artist Bernie Drummond, Ocean's Batman (1986), Head Over Heels and Match Day II. He was voted Programmer of the Year at the 1988 Golden Joysticks, moved to Rare, where he and Drummond made the Game Boy's Monster Max, and later founded Cranberry Source.

Jonathan Smith, known as Joffa, wrote Spectrum arcade conversions and film licences for Ocean and its Imagine label from 1984, among them Hyper Sports, Mikie, Green Beret and Cobra. In 1987 he left with Paul Finnegan to form Special FX in Liverpool, where he wrote Firefly and Batman: The Caped Crusader. By 1988 his fellow programmers ranked him among the best on the machine. He later worked on console games, and died in 2010, aged 43.

A Spectrum programmer who sold his own games on tape from 1987, reached thousands of players when CRASH put Egghead on its covertape in 1990, and wrote games for the Spectrum magazines until the last of them closed in 1993. He kept writing Spectrum games long after that, published new ones through Cronosoft from 2003, and in 2008 released Arcade Game Designer, the tool behind hundreds of new Spectrum games.

Jonathan Dunn was a music student who sent Ocean Software a demo just as Martin Galway was leaving, and joined its in-house team in October 1987. He wrote the music for Ocean's Daley Thompson's Olympic Challenge, Operation Wolf and RoboCop on the 8-bit machines, the Amiga Batman: The Movie, and the Game Boy RoboCop theme that later turned up in a television advert. He stayed with Ocean into the Infogrames years and later worked in game management and casino gaming.

Jordan Mechner wrote Karateka on the Apple II while a student at Yale and Prince of Persia straight after, animating both by tracing film of real people. He then spent four years and his savings on The Last Express, wrote the first screenplay for the Prince of Persia film, published the journals he kept while making his games, and turned to graphic novels.

Julian Gollop began with BASIC wargames for Red Shift in 1984, wrote Chaos for Games Workshop and Rebelstar for Firebird, set up his own label for Laser Squad, and with his brother Nick designed X-COM at Mythos Games. Since then he has made online and handheld tactics games, worked at Ubisoft Sofia, and runs Snapshot Games in Bulgaria, maker of Chaos Reborn and Phoenix Point.

Julian 'Jaz' Rignall won Computer and Video Games' arcade championship in 1983, was one of ZZAP!64's first two reviewers in 1985 and its editor in 1987–88, then edited Computer and Video Games and launched EMAP's console magazine Mean Machines. He later moved to the United States, to Virgin Interactive and then IGN.

A founding member of Game Freak, Junichi Masuda wrote the music and sound program for Pokémon Red and Green on the Game Boy, then directed the main Pokémon games from Ruby and Sapphire (2002) to X and Y (2013). He wrote the first concept document for Pokémon Go, and in 2022 left Game Freak for The Pokémon Company.

Kalms is the Swedish programmer Mikael Kalms, one of the coders behind The Black Lotus's run of Amiga competition wins from 2001, including Ocean Machine and Starstruck. He published a collection of chunky-to-planar routines for Amiga programmers, worked on games from Motorhead to Battlefield 3 at DICE, and in 2017 co-founded the Stockholm studio Fall Damage.

Karen Spärck Jones studied language and information retrieval. Her work on inverse document frequency explained why a term found in few documents can carry more weight in a search than one found almost everywhere.

Katherine Johnson analysed flight paths at Langley, from early spaceflight through Apollo and the Space Shuttle. Her published work shows how mathematical models connected a spacecraft’s orbit with a place on Earth.

Katsuhiro Harada joined Namco as an arcade promoter, balanced the first Tekken, was one of Tekken 3's designers and went on to direct and produce the series for three decades, becoming its best-known voice with fans. He left Bandai Namco at the end of 2025 and in 2026 became head of VS Studio, a new SNK studio.

kb (Tammo Hinrichs) wrote the music and the software synthesiser for farbrausch's 64K intro fr-08 (2000). The synthesiser, known as V2 (ViruZ II), is the one farbrausch says it used for all its intros, .kkrieger and debris. kb released V2 as a free plug-in for other musicians in 2004 and put its code in the public domain in 2012.

Keiji Inafune joined Capcom in 1987 as an illustrator, drew the first Mega Man and its hero's later redesigns, and rose to produce Onimusha, Dead Rising and Lost Planet and to run Capcom's research and development. He left in 2010 to found Comcept, crowdfunded Mighty No. 9 on Kickstarter in 2013, and later worked for Level-5.

Keita Takahashi trained as a sculptor and joined Namco in 1999. His first game, Katamari Damacy (2004), made him the Western development community's favourite designer. He made We Love Katamari and Noby Noby Boy, set out to design a playground in Nottingham, left Namco Bandai in 2010, and went on to make Wattam (2019) with Funomena and To a T (2025) with his own studio, Uvula.

A drama graduate and failed screenwriter who answered a games magazine job advert in 1995, Ken Levine wrote the first designs for Thief at Looking Glass, co-founded Irrational Games in 1997, led System Shock 2, and directed BioShock (2007) and BioShock Infinite (2013). He wound Irrational down in 2014; its successor, Ghost Story Games, announced Judas in 2022.

Ken Sugimori found Satoshi Tajiri's games fanzine Game Freak in a Shinjuku bookshop as a teenager, became its illustrator, and helped turn it into a games developer in 1989. He drew the characters of its first game, Quinty, directed Pulseman for the Mega Drive, and designed many of the monsters for Pocket Monsters Red and Green, released for the Game Boy in 1996. He sits on Game Freak's board.

Kevin Toms wrote Football Manager in 1982 and ran Addictive Games, the company that sold it. His bearded photograph on the box and in the advertising became part of the game's identity, and by Addictive's own count it sold half a million copies in six years. He wrote Football Manager 2 in 1988 and returned to the game again on phones in 2016 and on Steam in 2025.

Koji Igarashi, credited as IGA, joined Konami as a programmer, wrote the story of Tokimeki Memorial and was assistant director of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997). He produced the Castlevania series through the 2000s, kept Symphony's explorable castle alive on the Game Boy Advance and DS, left Konami in March 2014 and raised $5.5 million on Kickstarter in 2015 for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, released in 2019.

Koji Kondo joined Nintendo in April 1984 as one of the first two staff it hired to work on music. Within eighteen months he had written the music for Super Mario Bros., and a few months later the score for The Legend of Zelda, including a title theme he wrote overnight when the team found their first choice was still under copyright.

Lasse Öörni, known as Cadaver, publishes C64 games, development tools and technical explanations. His writing connects scrolling, music routines and game-loop design to the practical choices behind them.

Lloyd Mangram answered the letters in CRASH from its first issue in 1984, and later in ZZAP!64, ran CRASH's Hall of Slime high-score table and its playing tips, and gave his initials to Newsfield's magazine LM. He was a house name. Matthew Uffindell later wrote that Lloyd's early contributions combined his own text and opinions with Roger Kean's; the magazines themselves kept the joke going, with a 1922 Hermes typewriter and a paper bag over his head.

Louis Castle and Brett Sperry started Westwood in Las Vegas in 1985. Castle programmed, designed and led the art, producing DragonStrike, The Lion King and Blade Runner, and was one of the two founders behind Dune II and Command & Conquer. He stayed with Electronic Arts after it bought Westwood in 1998, and later ran studios at InstantAction, Zynga and Amazon.

Mad Max was the scene name of Jochen Hippel, a German musician who joined the Atari ST demo group The Exceptions as a teenager, converted the Commodore 64 tunes in their BIG Demo, and wrote game music for Rainbow Arts, Hewson, Thalion and others. His replay routines spread so widely that ST Magazine blamed them, in 1993, for games crashing on the Atari Falcon.

Manabu Takemura is the Capcom designer whom Edge named in 1998 as the creator of Ryu, the karate fighter at the centre of Street Fighter. In Edge's interview he explained why Ryu wears a white uniform, a headband and no shoes, and why he made him more muscular.

Manami Matsumae composed the first Mega Man's music and sound effects, then scored arcade games, horse-racing simulations and later independent games. Her work joins memorable melodies to the practical demands of play.

Manfred Trenz joined Rainbow Arts as a graphic artist after a 64'er graphics competition, drew the C64 Great Giana Sisters, and then wrote Katakis, which Activision's objections turned into Denaris, and Turrican and Turrican II, which ZZAP! ranked among the best C64 games. He later wrote Super Turrican for the NES, Enforcer for the C64 and Rendering Ranger for the Super Famicom, and went on making handheld and console games.

Marc Blank helped write Zork at MIT while training as a doctor, qualified in 1979 and chose Infocom instead. With Joel Berez he designed the Z-machine that carried Infocom's games to home computers; he co-wrote the Zork trilogy and Enchanter with Dave Lebling, and on his own wrote Deadline, Border Zone and Journey. In 1993 he and Michael Berlyn started the studio that became Eidetic, maker of Syphon Filter.

Margaret Hamilton led Apollo flight software development at MIT. Her career connects weather forecasting, air defence and spacecraft with a sustained concern: how a program should behave when something goes wrong.

Mark Cerny joined Atari's coin-op division at 17 in 1982 and designed Marble Madness. At Sega he made Master System games in Tokyo, pushed through the 3-D glasses and founded Sega Technical Institute, where Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was made. He built 3DO games at Crystal Dynamics, signed Naughty Dog and Insomniac for Universal Interactive Studios, taught the industry his 'Method' for pre-production, and from 2008 was the lead architect of the PlayStation 4, then of the PlayStation 5 and PS5 Pro.

An illustrator and game artist known for Lucasfilm backgrounds, carefully dithered colours and animated landscapes made by cycling a palette. His later work includes Thimbleweed Park.

A self-taught programmer from Auckland who wrote Blitz BASIC for the Amiga in 1990 and the much larger Blitz Basic 2 for Acid Software, the company he started with Simon Armstrong. He wrote Amiga games of his own, from Overkill and the CD32 shooter Guardian to Gloom, took Blitz to Windows with BlitzBasic, Blitz3D and BlitzMax, and died in December 2024.

Markus 'Notch' Persson, a Swedish programmer who learned on a Commodore 128, wrote Minecraft in his spare time in 2009 and sold it to players while it was still unfinished. He founded Mojang to run it, handed the game on in 2011, and left when Microsoft bought the company for $2.5 billion in 2014. His later public statements led Microsoft to distance Minecraft from him.

Martin Alper was one of the founders of Mastertronic, the £1.99 budget label launched in 1984, and its managing director. He set up its American operation, stayed with the business after Virgin bought into it, and in the 1990s ran Virgin Interactive Entertainment from California.

Martin Galway joined Ocean Software in Manchester as a teenager in 1984 and wrote the Commodore 64 music for dozens of its games, among them Rambo, Parallax, Arkanoid and Wizball. His Arkanoid was one of the first commercial C64 releases to play drum sounds through the SID's volume register. He left Ocean around the end of 1987, worked with Sensible Software and on Times of Lore, and went on to lead the audio at Origin Systems and Digital Anvil, and in 2012 on Cloud Imperium Games' Star Citizen.

Martin Hollis joined Rare as a graduate in 1993, programmed on Killer Instinct and then directed GoldenEye 007 (1997) for the Nintendo 64 with a team that had barely made a game before. He led Perfect Dark for its first 14 months, left Rare in 1998, helped Nintendo of America shape the GameCube, and in Cambridge founded Zoonami, which made original puzzle and music games such as Zendoku and Bonsai Barber.

Martin Walker’s C64 games and signed development diaries connect finished software with the choices behind its scrolling, sprite handling and music. His Citadel diary records experiments rather than a tidy retrospective recipe.

Mary Jackson moved from Langley’s West Area Computing group into aerodynamic research. Her work with Kazimierz Czarnecki investigated airflow over cones; she later worked to improve opportunities for other technical staff.

Masahiro Sakurai joined HAL Laboratory at 19 and began the game that became Kirby's Dream Land (1992), a Game Boy platformer meant for players of any skill. At HAL he went on to direct Super Smash Bros. (1999), which put Nintendo's characters in a fighting game. He left HAL in 2003, has worked freelance through his company Sora ever since, directing Kid Icarus: Uprising, every later Smash Bros. game and Kirby Air Riders (2025), and from 2022 to 2024 made a YouTube series about how games are designed.

A Namco programmer and designer who made Xevious (1983) and The Tower of Druaga (1984), two arcade games built around hidden things for players to find and share. He left Namco in 1985 to co-found the developer Game Studio, which continued the Druaga series for Namco, and later became a professor in the game department of Tokyo Polytechnic University.

Masaya Matsuura spent ten years in the Japanese electronic pop group PSY-S, made music software of his own, and then designed PaRappa the Rapper (1996), the PlayStation game the rhythm-action genre grew from. With his company NanaOn-Sha he went on to make Um Jammer Lammy, Vib-Ribbon, which built its levels from the player's own music CDs, and later music games for the Wii, iPhone and Kinect.

Masayuki Uemura came to Nintendo from Sharp in the early 1970s to work on light guns, worked on its first TV game consoles, and led the teams that built the Famicom and the Super Famicom. As head of Nintendo's R&D 2 he was responsible for its home console hardware. After leaving Nintendo in 2004 he taught at Ritsumeikan University. He died in December 2021, aged 78.

Matt Furniss joined Teque, the Rotherham company behind Krisalis, straight from school in 1989. He wrote music for Amiga and Commodore 64 games, then, with a sound system built by Shaun Hollingworth, composed or converted the music for dozens of Mega Drive, Master System and Game Gear games made by British and American developers, from Mortal Kombat and The Lion King to Puggsy and The Second Samurai.

Matthew Smith was a Liverpool teenager when he wrote Manic Miner (1983), which became the best-selling computer game in Britain within weeks, and Jet Set Willy (1984). His first commercial program sold 13 copies; by 1984 he was a major shareholder in his own software house. Then no new game of his appeared for years, and in 2001 PC Zone was still asking where he had gone.

Michel Ancel joined Ubi Soft as a teenager around 1989, after sending it an animation he had drawn on an Atari ST. That limbless character became Rayman (1995). He went on to lead Rayman 2, Beyond Good & Evil (2003), Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) and, as head of Ubisoft Montpellier, the hand-drawn Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends. He left the games industry in 2020 to work on wildlife, while Ubisoft was investigating complaints about his management, which he denied.

Scottish programmer and one of DMA Design's first staff. By his own account he drew the eight-pixel animation that grew into Lemmings, and he wrote the prototype city engines that became Grand Theft Auto. He later led development of GameMaker: Studio at YoYo Games and became one of the best-known developers for the ZX Spectrum Next, for which he wrote the CSpect emulator and a new Lemmings.

A games reviewer for Personal Computer News and adventure columnist for Dragon User, Mike Gerrard ran Your Sinclair's adventure pages from May 1986 to September 1991, turning them into a monthly conversation with readers who were stuck, readers who could help and the amateur authors he reviewed. He also wrote for Zero, published his own Spectrum adventure through Zenobi, and later left to write books and radio.

Mike Lamb wrote Pool for CDS as a teenager, joined Ocean in Manchester in 1986, and programmed a run of its Spectrum hits: Top Gun, Arkanoid, Renegade, Combat School (with Andrew Deakin), Target Renegade, RoboCop and Batman: The Movie, the last three with the artist Dawn Drake. In 1989 a CRASH reader ranking Ocean's staff put him at number one. He later moved to the United States, where he co-founded Left Field Productions, the studio behind Excitebike 64.

Mike Singleton taught English, ran one of Britain's first computer-moderated play-by-mail games, and wrote games for the PET, ZX81 and VIC-20 before Beyond asked him for The Lords of Midnight in 1983. Its landscaping technique drew a whole land from a map, and he carried the idea on through Doomdark's Revenge, Midwinter and a third Midnight game for the PC. He died in 2012.

A Kyoto civil engineer and son-in-law of Hiroshi Yamauchi, Minoru Arakawa founded Nintendo of America in 1980 and ran it for twenty-two years. He turned a warehouse of unsold Radar Scope machines into Donkey Kong, refused to settle with Universal, test-launched the NES in New York when American shops wanted nothing to do with video games, and signed Nintendo's Tetris deal in Moscow.

Neil Baldwin wrote music and sound software for Eurocom's NES games, then made tools that let other musicians compose for the console. NTRQ puts a tracker on the NES itself; Nijuu turns text-based music into playable files.

An Italian programmer from Siena who wrote Amiga utilities in the early 1990s, then merged his single-game arcade emulators into MAME, released on 5 February 1997. He coordinated the project until 2003, helped crack Capcom's CPS-2 encryption in 2007, and later turned to logic puzzles and puzzle games for mobile phones.

Nobuo Uematsu taught himself music, wrote for adverts before a friend brought him to Square in 1986, and scored the Final Fantasy games from the first in 1987 to the ninth almost alone. He left Square Enix in 2004, played his music as rock with The Black Mages, and co-founded the Distant Worlds orchestral concerts in 2007.

Nolan Bushnell made Computer Space, the first mass-produced coin-operated video game, founded Atari with Ted Dabney in 1972 and specified the Pong that Al Alcorn built. He sold Atari to Warner in 1976, left after a row with its management in 1978, and spent the next forty years starting companies, from the Pizza Time Theatre restaurants to the robot maker Androbot and the uWink restaurants.

Oliver Frey (1948-2022) was a Swiss-born comic artist and illustrator who co-founded Newsfield with his brother Franco and Roger Kean, and painted the covers of CRASH from its first issue in 1984 into 1992, as well as Zzap!64's and Amtix!'s. Before that he had drawn war comics, The Trigan Empire and comic-book art for the opening of the 1978 Superman film.

Pasi Ojala, also known as Albert, wrote C64 technical articles and developed pucrunch. His work explains both the display tricks a reader can reproduce and the trade-offs behind compact data and small decompressors.

A maths teacher who took up programming on a ZX81, Pete Cooke wrote text adventures for Richard Shepherd Software, then for CRL wrote Juggernaut, Tau Ceti and its sequel Academy, solid-3D Spectrum games built around their own technical tricks. He followed them with Micronaut One for Nexus and Earthlight for Firebird, converted Geoff Crammond's Stunt Car Racer to the Spectrum, and wrote the menu code for Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix games.

Peter Molyneux co-founded Bullfrog in Guildford in 1987 and designed and programmed Populous, the 1989 game that the press soon called a 'god game'. Bullfrog followed it with Powermonger, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper, and Electronic Arts bought the company in 1995. Molyneux left in 1997 to found Lionhead, which made Black & White and Fable and was bought by Microsoft in 2006. His habit of describing features that never reached the finished game became as well known as the games; he apologised for it after Fable, and again over Curiosity, the first project of his third studio, 22cans.

Psi (Sami Tammilehto) was the one member of Future Crew who stayed from its start on the Commodore 64 in 1986 to its last demos. He wrote the PC music editor Scream Tracker and the sample editor Advanced DigiPlayer, and coded more parts of Second Reality than anyone else.

Purple Motion (Jonne Valtonen) joined Future Crew as a teenager in 1991 and wrote most of the music for Second Reality. He scored Remedy's first game, Death Rally, studied composition, and became the arranger behind the orchestral game-music concerts Symphonic Shades, Symphonic Fantasies and Final Symphony.

R. J. Mical worked on Amiga system software and co-designed the Atari Lynx. His work joined the machine’s unusual hardware to the interfaces and development tools that people used to control it.

Raffaele Cecco (born 1967) left college for Mikro-Gen at 18, then wrote Exolon, Cybernoid, Cybernoid II, Stormlord and Deliverance for Hewson between 1987 and 1990, colourful Spectrum shoot-'em-ups that CRASH and Your Sinclair rated among the best of their day. He kept a diary of his work in CRASH, and went on to program First Samurai on the Amiga.

A German-born television engineer working for a New Hampshire defence contractor, Ralph Baer wrote down the idea of playing games on an ordinary TV set in 1966. His team at Sanders Associates built the Brown Box, which Magnavox turned into the Odyssey, the first home video game console, in 1972. The patents that came out of that work won every court case Magnavox and Sanders brought, starting with the one over Atari's Pong. He also co-designed Milton Bradley's Simon, and received the National Medal of Technology in 2006.

An Ultima fan who won his way into Electronic Arts' French office through a magazine quiz, Raphaël Colantonio founded Arkane Studios in Lyon in 1999 to make first-person RPGs in the Looking Glass tradition. He ran it for 18 years, co-directed Dishonored with Harvey Smith and was creative director of Prey (2017), then left to found WolfEye Studios, whose Weird West came out in 2022.

A former executive vice-president of Burlington Industries, Ray Kassar ran Atari for Warner Communications from 1978 to 1983. He built it into a business with projected revenue of $2 billion, lost the programmers who founded Activision, and resigned in July 1983 as the losses mounted. The SEC charged him with selling Warner shares half an hour before the December 1982 profit warning; he settled without admitting or denying it.

Richard Bartle met Roy Trubshaw in his first week at Essex University in 1978, finished the multi-user dungeon Trubshaw had started, and spent the next twenty years running MUD and writing its successor, MUD2. His book Designing Virtual Worlds followed in 2003, and his four player types, first set out in 1990 and expanded in 1996, are still taught to game designers.

Richard Cockayne started PSS in Coventry in 1981 with Gary Mays, when neither of them could program. He was the director who led its campaign against tape-copier adverts and who steered it towards 16-bit machines under Mirrorsoft. After Mirrorsoft took control he started again in a different trade, selling TENS pain-relief machines by mail order.

Richard Garriott wrote Akalabeth on a computer-shop Apple II in 1979, sold it in zip-lock bags, and built the Ultima series from it. In 1983 he started Origin Systems with his brother Robert and Chuck Bueche; Ultima IV turned the role-playing game towards the player's own conduct, and Ultima Online took Britannia online in 1997. He left Origin in 2000, made Tabula Rasa for NCsoft, flew to the International Space Station in 2008 and returned to fantasy role-playing with Shroud of the Avatar in 2018.

Richard Joseph’s game audio work crossed C64 and Amiga development. His interviews and period credits distinguish original composition from the programming and adaptation needed to make music play in a game.

Rick Dickinson joined Sinclair straight from college at the end of the 1970s. He put the ZX80 into production, then designed the ZX81, the ZX Spectrum and its rubber keyboard, the Microdrive cartridge and the QL. Decades later he and Phil Candy designed the case of the ZX Spectrum Next.

Andrew Hewson's son: a LEGO game director at TT Games who helped his father fund and write Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers, became chief executive and creative director of the revived Hewson Consultants in 2016, and runs its successor, Huey Games, whose first release, Hyper Sentinel, is a modern shooter in the line of Uridium.

Rob Hubbard was a working musician of about thirty when he learned to program the Commodore 64's SID chip. From Thing on a Spring and Monty on the Run in 1985 to Sanxion and Delta, ZZAP!64's readers voted his tunes the best on the machine, and in 1988 he moved to the United States to work on sound for Electronic Arts.

Rob Northen protected Acornsoft's BBC Micro disc games, including Elite, then went independent. His Copylock system protected around 500 Amiga games between 1988 and 1996, from Lemmings to Speedball 2, and his ProPack compression and disk formats turned up in games and on magazine cover disks on the Amiga, ST, PC and consoles. He never wrote a game himself.

A housewife who got hooked on Colossal Cave in 1979, Roberta Williams designed Mystery House, the adventure with pictures that launched On-Line Systems, later Sierra On-Line, with her husband Ken. She went on to write the giant Time Zone, the King's Quest series, the Laura Bow mysteries, Mixed-Up Mother Goose and the full-motion-video horror game Phantasmagoria, left the industry at the end of the 1990s, and returned in 2023 with a 3D remake of Colossal Cave.

British artist and designer, born in 1944, whose floating landscapes on Yes's album covers from 1971 made him famous. He designed the owl logo of Psygnosis and painted its boxes from Brataccas to Shadow of the Beast, later worked with Henk Rogers and designed the Tetris logo, and in 2014 lost a copyright suit against the makers of Avatar.

Roger Kean (1948–2023) founded Newsfield in Ludlow with Oliver and Franco Frey, edited the first issues of CRASH and later ZZAP!64, and ran the company's magazines as editorial director. After Newsfield collapsed in 1991 he carried on in Ludlow as a publisher for Europress Impact, and later wrote illustrated history books.

Romeo Knight is a German composer who started on a Commodore 128 with Chris Hülsbeck's Soundmonitor and became one of the best-known Amiga demo musicians of 1989 and 1990, writing two of the songs for Red Sector Inc.'s Megademo. Scene polls voted him best musician in 1990. He later worked as a sound engineer for advertising and kept making music for demos and games.

Ron Gilbert started as a Commodore 64 programmer, joined Lucasfilm Games in 1985 to port its games to the C64, and there designed Maniac Mansion with Gary Winnick, built the SCUMM scripting system to finish it, and made the first two Monkey Island games. He left in 1992 to co-found Humongous Entertainment, which made Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish and spun off Cavedog, then worked on DeathSpank and The Cave, and returned to point-and-click with Thimbleweed Park (2017) and Return to Monkey Island (2022).

Royston Carter co-founded Gargoyle Games in Dudley with Greg Follis and wrote its code. A walking-figure routine he wrote after Ad Astra became Cuchulainn, the hero of Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach, and when Gargoyle finally bought an Amstrad CPC in 1985 he had Dun Darach running on it within two weeks.

ryg (Fabian Giesen) coded for the German demo group farbrausch from its first year. He wrote kkrunchy, the executable packer used for farbrausch's 64K intros from 2003 and by other groups including Fairlight and Conspiracy, and most of the 3D engine and mesh generator shared by Candytron, .kkrieger and debris. Since 2010 he has been at RAD Game Tools, working on the Oodle data compression library.

Sandy White studied sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art, built a Sinclair MK14 into one of his working sculptures, and in 1983 wrote Ant Attack for Quicksilva with Angela Sutherland: a walled city drawn in isometric 3D on the 48K Spectrum, a year before Knight Lore. Zombie Zombie and I, of the Mask followed; an Amiga game for Telecomsoft was cancelled, and in the 1990s he built motion-capture and physics experiments for Psygnosis.

Satoru Iwata joined the small Tokyo developer HAL Laboratory as a programmer in 1982, wrote early Famicom games including Balloon Fight, became HAL's president and in 2002 succeeded Hiroshi Yamauchi as president of Nintendo. He led it through the DS and the Wii, took the blame and pay cuts for the 3DS and Wii U, and interviewed its developers himself in Iwata Asks. He died in July 2015, aged 55.

Satoshi Tajiri collected insects as a boy in suburban Tokyo, wrote and stapled together a games fanzine called Game Freak as a teenager, and turned it into a development company in 1989. He spent about six years on Pocket Monsters Red and Green, released for the Game Boy in 1996, built on the idea of monsters travelling between players over the link cable.

Founder of Apogee Software in Garland, Texas. With Kroz in 1987 he found a way to sell games as shareware, giving away the first game of a series and selling the others; he then published id Software's Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, co-created Duke Nukem, and ran Apogee and 3D Realms with George Broussard.

South African-born mathematician who worked with Jean Piaget in Geneva, co-directed MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, helped create the Logo language at BBN in 1967–68 and led its development at MIT. His book Mindstorms (1980) made the case for children programming computers, and he spent the 1980s arguing for a computer for every child.

Shigeru Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977 as its first staff artist, with a degree in industrial design and a portfolio of wooden coat hangers. His first video game, Donkey Kong (1981), was made to rescue a warehouse of unsold arcade cabinets. He went on to lead the team behind Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, became a producer overseeing many games at once, and is now an Executive Fellow and Representative Director of Nintendo.

A Japanese advertising copywriter, essayist and television presenter, Shigesato Itoi fell for Super Mario Bros., took Shigeru Miyamoto an idea for an RPG set in ordinary places, and wrote the Mother series: Mother (Famicom, 1989), Mother 2 (Super Famicom, 1994, released in America as EarthBound) and, after a Nintendo 64 version was cancelled, Mother 3 (Game Boy Advance, 2006). Since 1998 he has run the website and company Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun.

Shinji Mikami joined Capcom in 1990 and made his directing debut with Resident Evil (1996), the game that named survival horror. He produced its sequels and Dino Crisis, oversaw Devil May Cry, remade Resident Evil for the GameCube and directed Resident Evil 4 (2005), which turned the series towards action. After God Hand at Clover Studio he co-founded Platinum Games, directed Vanquish, and in 2010 founded Tango Gameworks, where he directed The Evil Within (2014). He left Tango in 2023 and set up a new company, KAMUY.

Sid Meier was a programmer at General Instrument when he and Bill Stealey founded MicroProse in 1982. He wrote its early flight and submarine simulations for the Atari 8-bit computers and the Commodore 64, then Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon and Civilization, which MicroProse sold under his name. In 1996 he left to co-found Firaxis Games, where he was still working when his memoir was published in 2020.

Clive Sinclair's ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum cut the price of a home computer below £100 and put one in hundreds of thousands of British homes, where a generation taught itself to program.

Skaven (Peter Hajba) wrote music and drew graphics for Future Crew from 1992, including part of the music of Second Reality, and won Assembly music competitions in 1993, 1995 and 2002. He went on to write music for games such as Unreal Tournament and Bejeweled 2, and to work on textures, animation and sound at Remedy Entertainment.

Sophie Wilson designed Acorn's first microcomputer, wrote the BASIC used by the BBC Micro, and designed ARM's instruction set. Her work connects the language a programmer types to the operations a processor carries out.

Steve Crow was a 19-year-old freelance programmer when Bubble Bus published his Wizard's Lair in 1985. Starquake followed the same year, and readers of Computer & Video Games voted him Programmer of the Year. He wrote Firelord for Hewson in 1986, then turned to graphics: Zynaps, Probe's Commodore 64 conversions of Turbo OutRun and Golden Axe, and, at Shiny Entertainment, Earthworm Jim.

Steve Furber helped design the BBC Micro and the first ARM processor at Acorn. His later Manchester research explored asynchronous processors and SpiNNaker’s many-processor approach to modelling neural activity.

Steve Meretzky joined Infocom as a game tester in November 1981 and wrote or co-wrote eight of its games, among them Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Douglas Adams, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. After Infocom he wrote the Spellcasting games for Legend, co-founded Boffo Games, and moved on to online, social and mobile games.

Steve Screech worked with Anco on Kick Off and Player Manager, designed the basketball game Tip Off, and after Dino Dini left for Virgin in 1993 programmed and co-designed Kick Off 3 (1994). He went on to program Player Manager 2, and was later credited with Anco's remaining Kick Off games.

Steve Turner left a job programming insurance systems in 1983 to write Spectrum games for Hewson Consultants. His Avalon and Dragontorc turned the arcade adventure into what the boxes called an 'adventure movie', Quazatron put Paradroid's droid-grappling into a scrolling 3D city, and the team he started with Andrew Braybrook became Graftgold, which wrote games under contract until the late 1990s.

A Liverpool-based programmer who added 74 rooms to Jet Set Willy in its Amstrad conversion at Software Projects, wrote the Spectrum versions of Odin's Nodes of Yesod, Robin of the Wood and Heartland, and made the smooth-scrolling shoot-'em-ups Sidewize and Crosswize with the artist Colin Grunes. He went on to co-found Eldritch the Cat, which made Projectyle for Electronic Arts, and to work at Westwood Studios on Command & Conquer.

Steve Wilcox ran a Walsall computer shop before he and his father, Brian, founded Elite Systems in 1984. He bid for Commando, flew alone to a Tokyo game show and came back with Paperboy, Bomb Jack and Space Harrier, and was still running Elite decades later, selling its old Spectrum games on phones and consoles.

Working for the Cambridge software firm Nine Tiles, Steven Vickers turned the ZX80's BASIC into the ZX81's, wrote most of the ZX Spectrum's ROM with John Grant, and is credited as author of the manual that came in the Spectrum's box.

Takaya Imamura joined Nintendo in 1989 as a graphic designer on F-Zero, where he designed Captain Falcon, and went on to design the characters of Star Fox. He was art director of Star Fox 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, where he created Tingle, later directed Steel Diver, and retired in January 2021 after 32 years. Since leaving he has taught in Osaka and drawn the manga Omega 6, which became a game in 2024.

Teresa Maughan joined Your Sinclair as production editor with its first issue, became deputy editor, and edited the magazine for 28 issues from February 1987 to May 1989, the years it reached its highest sales. Readers knew her as T'zer. She then moved into publishing at Dennis.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi joined Sega in 1990 and produced Sega Rally Championship before turning, at the end of the decade, to games built around music: Space Channel 5, Rez and, at his own studio Q Entertainment, Lumines. He described Rez as a synaesthesia-driven 'Dramatic-Trance-Music Shooter', and has pursued the same idea since at Enhance, the company behind Rez Infinite and Tetris Effect.

Tetsuya Takahashi drew graphics at Nihon Falcom and Square, designed the Magitek Armor of Final Fantasy VI, then wrote and directed Xenogears (1998). He left Square in 1999 to help found Monolith Soft, where he made Xenosaga for Namco, and after Nintendo bought the studio in 2007 he directed Xenoblade Chronicles, a game Edge called a return to form.

David and Richard Darling were selling their own games by mail order while still at school, wrote many of Mastertronic's first budget hits, and in 1986 founded Code Masters with their father Jim. They took it from £1.99 cassettes to the Game Genie, unlicensed NES cartridges and the Mega Drive J-Cart, sold the last of their stake in 2007, and David went on to found the mobile games company Kwalee.

Twin brothers Philip and Andrew Oliver sold their first program, a Dragon 32 type-in, to Computer & Video Games in 1984 while still at school. From 1986 they wrote for Code Masters: Super Robin Hood, Grand Prix Simulator and the first three Dizzy adventures. They stayed freelance, and later founded the development studio Interactive Studios, renamed Blitz Games.

Chris and Tim Stamper came to the ZX Spectrum from designing arcade games, ran Ultimate Play the Game from Ashby-de-la-Zouch with almost no contact with the press, and then quietly rebuilt their business around Nintendo's console as Rare. They left Rare in 2007.

Tim Cain started the prototype that became Interplay's Fallout in 1994 and led it to release in 1997 as its producer and lead programmer. He left Interplay early in 1998, co-founded Troika Games, which made Arcanum, The Temple of Elemental Evil and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines before closing in 2005, and later co-directed Obsidian's The Outer Worlds. Since 2023 he has told the stories of his career on YouTube.

Tim Follin was still at school when his three-part tunes began turning up in Spectrum games written by his brother Mike. He went on to write music at Software Creations for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, NES and SNES, and reviewers often praised the music of Follin games more than the games themselves.

Started Gilsoft at seventeen, published Graeme Yeandle's The Quill and led the team behind PAW, then wrote DAAD for the Spanish publisher Aventuras AD. Four decades on he writes the adventure column in Next Magazine, and PAW ships with the ZX Spectrum Next.

Tim Jenison wrote the CoCo Max paint program for Tandy's Color Computer, then started NewTek alone in Topeka, Kansas. His Digi-View digitiser put colour photographs on an Amiga screen in 1986, and his Video Toaster, a $1,595 Amiga card, did the work of a rack of broadcast equipment and won him and its designers an Emmy in 1993. Two decades later he spent years recreating a Vermeer painting, filmed for a documentary directed by Teller.

Tim Schafer joined Lucasfilm Games straight from college in 1989, co-wrote the first two Monkey Island games, co-led Day of the Tentacle, and led Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. In 2000 he founded Double Fine Productions in San Francisco, which made Psychonauts and Brütal Legend, turned its internal game jams into a run of small games, raised $3.3 million on Kickstarter in 2012 for the adventure that became Broken Age, was bought by Microsoft in 2019 and became independent again in 2026.

Tim Sweeney wrote ZZT in 1991 as a University of Maryland engineering student, sold it as shareware under the name Potomac Computer Systems, and turned the business into Epic MegaGames. He wrote most of Unreal's engine himself, licensed it to other studios, and still runs Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, which has fought Apple and Google in court over their app stores.

A German computer-science student who wrote a two-disk public-domain Star Trek game that seemed to be on every Amiga, and filled British PD catalogues with his ray-traced and animated starships under the Agatron name. He drew the graphics for Oil Imperium, made the intro for Team17's Alien Breed and later ran The Light Works, a computer-graphics and visual-effects company in Cologne.

A Norfolk teenager who designed a dream games console for ACE in 1990, Toby Simpson became Millennium's lead programmer, designed Global Effect and wrote Diggers, the first game made only for Commodore's CD32 and one of the two games in its box. He went on to produce the Creatures series at CyberLife, worked on software design at DeepMind and co-founded Fetch.ai.

Todd Howard joined Bethesda Softworks in the mid-1990s, worked on its Terminator games, and was project leader on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002). As head of Bethesda Game Studios he led The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Starfield: hand-built worlds the player can wander for hundreds of hours, praised for their freedom and criticised for their bugs.

Tokuro Fujiwara designed Pooyan and Roc'n Rope at Konami, then moved to Capcom in 1983, where he directed Commando and created Ghosts 'n Goblins in 1985. On Capcom's console side he produced Mega Man 2 and much of the series that followed, and directed the Famicom horror game Sweet Home, whose mansion led to Resident Evil. He left Capcom at the end of 1995 to found Whoopee Camp, maker of Tomba!, and returned to Arthur and his boxer shorts in 2006 and again in 2021.

A game composer and studio founder who co-created Video Games Live with Jack Wall and presented games on television. His credits need to distinguish personal composition from his studio's sound work.

Tomohiro Nishikado joined Taito as an electronics engineer and designed its early video games, among them Speed Race and Western Gun. For Space Invaders (1978) he did the planning, design, graphics, program and hardware himself, building his own development tools as he went. He made its sequel, Space Invaders Part II, and in 1996 set up his own studio, Dreams.

Tomonobu Itagaki joined Tecmo in 1992, led the team that made Dead or Alive (1996), and as head of Team Ninja brought Ninja Gaiden back in 3D on the Xbox in 2004. Famous for his difficult games, his confidence and his sexualised fighters, he left Tecmo in 2008 and sued it over unpaid bonuses, settling in 2010. He then led Valhalla Game Studios, whose Devil's Third came out in 2015, founded Itagaki Games in 2021, and died in October 2025.

Toni Baker's Mastering Machine Code on Your ZX81, from Interface Publications, was on sale by February 1982 and became one of the books Sinclair owners learned Z80 machine code from. Its Spectrum successor followed at the end of 1983, and through the mid-1980s she wrote machine-code features for Your Spectrum and ZX Computing.

A Finnish programmer who has worked on WinUAE, the Windows version of the UAE Amiga emulator, since 1998 and has led it since the early 2000s. His changelogs record two decades of work on timing: a near cycle-exact mode, support for images of copy-protected disks, and a steady stream of fixes for individual games and demos.

Tony Crowther was a teenage star of the Commodore 64, writing Blagger and Loco for Alligata and Suicide Express for Gremlin, and moving between publishers so often that one magazine called him 'the gypsy of the software world'. With Ben Daglish he ran the music company W.E.M.U.S.I.C. He wrote Captive and Knightmare for Mindscape on the Amiga, built 3D engines for Gremlin in the 1990s and went on to console work.

Toru Iwatani joined Namco in 1977, started on video pinball games, and in 1980 made Pac-Man, a maze game about eating that he designed so that women and couples would play. He stayed at Namco for thirty years, working on Pac-Land, Libble Rabble and, later, Pac-Man Championship Edition, and in 2007 became a professor in the Faculty of Arts at Tokyo Polytechnic University.

Toshihiro Nagoshi joined Sega in 1989 as a designer under Yu Suzuki, directed the arcade hit Daytona USA, ran the Amusement Vision studio that made Super Monkey Ball and Nintendo's F-Zero GX, and created the Yakuza series. He left Sega in 2021 to start a studio funded by NetEase.

An Apple marketing manager who left in 1982 to found Electronic Arts, Trip Hawkins called his programmers 'software artists', put their names on the box and sold their games like record albums. In the 1990s he turned to hardware with the 3DO, a console standard licensed to other manufacturers; his 3DO Company sold its next machine to Matsushita and left hardware for software. After 3DO's bankruptcy in 2003 he founded the mobile games company Digital Chocolate, then If You Can, which made games to teach children social and emotional skills.

Vogue was the scene handle of Magnus Högdahl, a Swedish programmer who moved from the Amiga group Phenomena to the PC group Triton in the winter of 1991–92. He wrote code and ray-traced graphics for Crystal Dream, co-wrote the music program Fasttracker 2, founded Starbreeze Studios in 1998 and left it in 2009 with six colleagues to start MachineGames.

A Belgrade television film editor who designed the Galaksija, the Z80 computer that thousands of Yugoslavs built from a magazine's instructions in 1984. He went on to write hardware columns for Svet kompjutera and, decades later, to design conference badges for Hackaday.

Warren Robinett wrote Adventure for the Atari 2600, turning the rooms and objects of a mainframe text game into a graphical world, and hid his name in a secret room because Atari would not credit its programmers. The hidden credit became the best-known early video game Easter egg, though not the first. He also wrote BASIC Programming, co-founded The Learning Company, designed Rocky's Boots, and later worked on virtual reality at NASA and the University of North Carolina.

A former film scholar and tabletop game designer, Warren Spector produced Ultima VI, Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld and System Shock at Origin, worked with Looking Glass on Thief, and directed Deus Ex at Ion Storm's Austin studio. He later made Epic Mickey for Disney, joined OtherSide Entertainment in 2016 and announced his retirement in August 2026.

Wildfire (Arto Vuori) came to Future Crew from the Atari ST scene in the autumn of 1992. He assembled the demo Panic, co-wrote The Party 1992 invitation intro with Psi, and coded five of the parts of Second Reality.

Will Crowther was one of the three programmers who wrote the software for the ARPANET's first packet switches at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and a caver who surveyed the Bedquilt section of Kentucky's Colossal Cave. In 1975–76 he turned that cave into Adventure, a FORTRAN game for the PDP-10 that he wrote for his daughters. Don Woods's 1977 expansion carried it round the world's mainframes, and its form of room descriptions and typed commands became the text adventure.

Will Wright's first game was a helicopter shoot-'em-up, Raid on Bungeling Bay (Brøderbund, 1984). Building its islands turned out to be more fun than bombing them, and that became SimCity, which no publisher would take until he and Jeff Braun founded Maxis in 1987 to release it. He went on to SimEarth, SimAnt, The Sims (2000) and Spore (2008), left Electronic Arts in 2009 to run the Stupid Fun Club, and has spent the years since on Proxi, a game built from its players' memories.

Yoshiki Okamoto made Time Pilot at Konami against his boss's orders, joined Capcom as its ninth employee and designed 1942, its first hit. He went on to produce Final Fight and run the development side that made Street Fighter II and Resident Evil, rising to the company's board. In 2003 he left to set up Game Republic, which ran into debt, and he later worked on the smartphone hit Monster Strike.

Yoshio Sakamoto joined Nintendo in 1982 as a designer, drew for Game & Watch and early Famicom games, and is credited as a designer on Metroid. He wrote the Famicom Detective Club horror adventures, directed Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, and produced WarioWare games from 2004.

Yu Suzuki joined Sega as a programmer in 1983 and led the team behind its moving 'taikan' cabinets: Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner. In the 1990s his division, AM2, made Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter on Sega's first polygon hardware. He then spent years on Shenmue for the Dreamcast, founded his own studio, Ys Net, in 2008, and finished the story with Kickstarter backing in Shenmue III in 2019.

A freelance writer who taught himself to program, Yuji Horii won a game-making contest run by the publisher Enix, wrote the detective adventure The Portopia Serial Murder Case in 1983 and then designed and wrote Dragon Quest (1986), the series that set the pattern for the Japanese role-playing game. He was still overseeing it, through his own one-man company, Armor Project, decades later.

Yuji Naka joined Sega as a young programmer in the mid-1980s, made its Master System conversions of Space Harrier and Out Run, programmed Phantasy Star and, in 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog. As head of Sonic Team he produced NiGHTS into Dreams, Sonic Adventure and Phantasy Star Online. He left Sega in 2006 to found Prope, joined Square Enix in 2018 and directed Balan Wonderworld, and in 2023 was convicted of insider trading and given a suspended prison sentence.

Yuzo Koshiro was a teenager when Nihon Falcom used the music from his demo tape in Xanadu Scenario II. He went on to score Ys, Sorcerian, The Revenge of Shinobi, ActRaiser and the Streets of Rage games, writing most of it on an NEC PC-8801 in a music language of his own. In 1990 he set up the studio Ancient with his mother and sister, and he has run it ever since.