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The Greatest Game Designers of All Time
by Steven Kent for Gamers Today
The video game industry had two renaissance periods during the eighties (the golden are of arcades in which ended in 1982 and the NES period which lasted through 1990) during which time great geniuses of technology and creativity produced masterpieces with only 20K or 30K bytes of code. This does not mean, however, that the best games of the eighties are somehow superior to the games of today. If an NFL Blitz machine could somehow have materialized beside the first Ms. Pac-Man in a 1981 arcade, it may well have outsold the venerable Midway creation and become the biggest game in the history of American arcades.
With two exceptions, the greatest game creators are not limited to any one time period or medium. Shigeru Miyamoto, who is generally acknowledged as the single greatest game designer, has made games for arcades, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Game Boy, Super NES, and Nintendo 64 (N64), and is currently working games for Dolphin.
Now lists like this are generally limited to five people. I did not choose the number seven lightly. In fact, I did not choose to list seven people at all. You look through this list and see who doesn't belong, because I'm certainly not going to make a list like this and leave off the creator of Daytona, or the man who made Pitfall.
So here are the seven greats and the work they did that proves why they are so amazing:
Shigeru Miyamoto
Take Miyamoto out of Nintendo, and you'd have a company with the size and power of Hudson Soft-which is still very impressive.
The NES would never have succeeded without Mario, neither would Game Boy. The 16-bit Super NES built off the NES's momentum and its biggest game was a Rare title, but even Super NES and N64 were carried largely by the work of Miyamoto.
If there is one game designer who has reached celebrity status outside of Japan, it is Shigeru Miyamoto. Mainstream magazines cover his Blue Grass-loving, banjo-playing appreciation of western music, and endless articles have been written about how he created Donkey Kong, Zelda, and Mario. He also was behind the creation of Star Fox and had his hand in the development of Pokemon.
Indeed, when Howard Phillips, Nintendo's "Man Who Plays Games for A Living" spokesman left the company in the early nineties, his biggest complaint was that, "Sega of America has a whole department dedicated to making games; our strategy was to hold on tight and wait for the next game from Miyamoto."
Miyamoto is still making games, though his work is more diluted than it used to be. There was a time when "Miyamoto games" were created by Miyamoto and the programmers that translated his ideas into code. The only problem was that he could only do one or two games per year. These days Miyamoto oversees a huge department that is capable of producing several games each year.
In the first full year after the N64 was released, for instance, Miyamoto's team worked on or helped with Super Mario 64, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, Wave Race 64, Mario Kart 64, and Star Fox 64. His biggest complaint about this is that his employees care too much about what he thinks. He described the situation this way in a recent interview: "Most of my staff members have been working with me for more than 10 years now and I should say that they don't need any training. My only concern is that many of them have become little Miyamotos and what they need is to break away and become their own independent creators."
Ed Logg
Best known for his work as an arcade designer, Logg was America's Miyamoto before Miyamoto even entered the industry.
Logg joined Atari before the golden age of arcades. His first game was Super Breakout, a slightly modified version of a hit game that was originally designed by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. His nest projects, Asteroids and Centipede, earned him the nickname "Golden Boy" around Atari. With approximately 70,000 copies sold, Asteroids was the most successful arcade game in Atari's history.
Logg went on to create Gauntlet, Millipede, and Xybots before becoming involved in making console games. One of Logg's best-known and most controversial games was the version of Tetris that Atari published under the Tengen label for the NES. Hailed as a vastly superior game to the single-player version of Tetris that Nintendo released, Logg's game was banned in a court battle between Nintendo and Atari. By court order, the majority of Tengen Tetris cartridges were destroyed, making cartridges that sold before the court order valuable collectors' items.
In recent years, Logg has been involved in creating N64 versions of such popular arcade games as Wayne Gretzky Hockey and San Francisco Rush.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki is Sega's arcade answer to Nintendo's Miyamoto. His work generally bares three distinctive characteristics-cutting edge technology, deeply realistic simulations, and next to no humor. Other designers just make games, Suzuki concentrates on creating experiences.
Suzuki was not the first person to make a motorcycle racing game when he designed Hang On, but his game was the first to be built into a cabinet that was shaped like a motorcycle and moved in response to the game. At a time when other games had colorful ninjas who flew through the air and threw fireballs, Suzuki changed the look of fighting games with Virtua Fighter, a game with realistic-looking mortal combatants who use authentic martial arts.
Suzuki doesn't think small when it comes to hardware. His games typically have enormous high-resolution monitors, powerful sound systems, and force feedback controllers. Obviously, they cost a fortune to build. When his bosses balked at the cost of manufacturing Space Harrier, Suzuki said they would not have to pay him if the game bombed. Space Harrier did so well that he's never had to make that offer again.
Suzuki's latest project is a home game--Shenmue, a massive role-playing game series that Sega hopes will keep Dreamcast alive against the approaching threat of PlayStation2. This ambitious project will have 500 unique characters and a complex storyline set in Japan and China.
Eugene Jarvis
Seen as the heart and soul of Midway Games, Eugene Jarvis created two of the most dearly beloved games of the golden age of arcades-Defender and Robotron 2084.
Jarvis is more philosophical than most designers. He fundamentally believes that games should be nearly impossible to beat. Hence, he came up with Defender, a game that required players to master a five buttons-interface at a time when the most popular games had a single button or no buttons at all. A few years later, Jarvis topped himself by coming out with Robotron 2084, a game with two joysticks and no buttons. As he put it, "Most people cannot pat themselves on the head and rub their stomach at the same time. Running in one direction with one joystick while aiming with another is even harder."
Harder, but not impossible. There was great prestige to earning a high score on Jarvis's games, especially among hardcore gamers. His work is so respected, that Mark Turmell, the creator of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz, says he joined Midway so that he could work with Jarvis.
Jarvis's most recent work has been on the popular arcade driving games Cruis'n USA and Cruis'n World.
Dave Theurer
Dave Theurer is one of the all-time greats for what he did, what he didn't do, and what he could have done.
Throughout the eighties, Atari's Coin-op division had an unwritten maxim known as Theurer Law that said that, "No designer gets his/her first game published." The maxim was named after Dave Theurer, whose every game was published and is now considered a classic.
Theurer's first game was Missile Command, the famous trackball game in which players defended virtual cities from missiles, jets, and spaceships with an umbrella of ground-to-air missiles. His next game was Tempest, a game that often appears when critics and reporters create lists of the best arcade games ever.
Tempest was originally supposed to be a first-person perspective version of Space Invaders, but the idea did not resonate well as Theurer demonstrated the game at a company meeting. In a last-ditch effort to save the game, he wrapped his attack field around geometrical shapes and created one of the fastest and most challenging games of his day. Theurer's last game, I*Robot, was an early experimentation with 3D polygonal graphics that was brilliant both as a game and as a technological showpiece. Theurer left the game business after I*Robot and now develops more serious software. His most famous product is Debabblizer, a highly respected application for Macintosh computers.
Yuji Naka
If there is one designer who is woefully overlooked in these lists, it is Yuji Naka, the man who made Sonic The Hedgehog.
Part of the problem is that Naka is the victim of a Sonic backlash. Sonic has not matured and diversified as well as Mario, and some of the Sonic titles for Saturn were "sub-Sonic." Respect for Naka has waned because of this.
But judging the breadth of his work, Yuji Naka is definitely one of the all-time great designers. He designed and programed Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System-the game that is almost universally recognized as the best game to appear on that system.
Naka's version of Ghouls 'n Ghosts was the first great game to appear on Genesis. Granted that his passion for Phantasy Star seemed to thin out more and more with each new version, Sonic The Hedgehog and Sonic 2 were absolutely great.
Naka's involvement with Saturn was a mixed bag. On the positive side, he did NiGHTS, a dazzling demonstration of 2D wizardry that had many people thinking 3D. (NiGHTS was a side-scroller in which people traveled along a spiral. It was so free-flowing that many people mistook it for 3D.) As I mentioned before, Sonic R and Sonic Extreme left a bad taste in many people's mouths, but Naka finished his Saturn work with a hotly debated game called Burning Rangers that has a devoted core of fans (myself included) and a lot of detractors.
Naka's most recent game, Sonic Adventure, has largely been greeted as one of the first great titles of the new generation of video games-though some critics have dismissed it for flaws such as distracting camera angles.
David Crane
David Crane is important for several reasons. As one of the original internal programmers for the Atari Video Computer System (or 2600), he created some of the games (Atari Football comes to mind) and tools that helped that system find a market. As it grew, and his salary didn't, Crane and several friends left Atari and started Activision, the first independent, third-party publisher. Since nothing like Activision had ever existed, Crane and friends had to endure countless court battles.
Crane is also important for designing the single most influential original console game of its day-Pitfall! Yes, Donkey Kong and Pac-Man were very important games, but they were arcade games that migrated to home consoles. According to some reports, Pitfall! actually outsold them, and it was an entirely original concept.
Crane is also fairly unique in the breadth of systems he worked on. Though he is best known for his work with the Atari VCS, he also worked on the Atari 5200, the Atari 7800, the Commodore 64, the ColecoVision, NES, Super NES, Game Boy, Intellivision, Amiga, and Spectrum Sinclair.
