Noah Falstein is a game designer and producer who has been in the video game industry since 1980. He was one of the first 10 employees at Lucasfilm Games, DreamWorks Interactive, and The 3DO Company. He runs The Inspiracy and writes the "Better by Design" column for Game Developer magazine. He was hired by Google in April 2013 as 'Chief Game Designer', where he worked for 4 years before leaving in April 2017.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers.
Harvey Smith is an American video game designer and writer, working at Arkane Studios.
Gamasutra is a website founded in 1997 that focuses on all aspects of video game development. It is owned and operated by Informa and acted as the online sister publication to the print magazine Game Developer.
Toby Gard is an English video game character designer and consultant. He was part of the team that created fictional female British archaeologist Lara Croft. Lara Croft was awarded a Guinness World Record recognizing her as the "most successful human video game heroine."
Backbone Entertainment was an American video game developer based in Emeryville, California. The company was formed in 2003 as the result of a merger between developers Digital Eclipse and ImaginEngine. In 2005, Backbone merged with The Collective to form Foundation 9 Entertainment.
Jonathan David Blow is an American video game designer and programmer, who is best known as the creator of the independent video games Braid (2008) and The Witness (2016), both of which were released to critical acclaim.
Paradigm Entertainment was an American video game development company. Paradigm is perhaps best known for its vehicle simulation games. Founded as a 3D computer graphics company in 1990, Paradigm primarily worked on realistic flight simulation technology for major space and aviation clients. The company got its start in game development when it was contacted by Nintendo in 1994 to aid in the creation of one of the Nintendo 64's launch titles, Pilotwings 64. The game was a critical and commercial success for the developer, causing the simulation and entertainment divisions of Paradigm to separate and focus on their respective products. The newly independent Paradigm Entertainment continued to develop for Nintendo's 64-bit console. After a short partnership with Video System, Paradigm was acquired as a wholly owned subsidiary of Infogrames in 2000 and began developing games for sixth-generation video game consoles. Paradigm was sold to THQ in 2006 and was ultimately closed in 2008.
Xinghan Chen, known professionally as Jenova Chen, is a Chinese video game designer. He is the designer of the award-winning games Cloud, Flow, Flower, and Journey, and is co-founder of Thatgamecompany.
Brenda Louise Romero, previously known as Brenda Brathwaite, is an American game designer and developer in the video game industry. She was born in Ogdensburg, New York and is a graduate of Clarkson University. Romero is best known for her work on the Wizardry series of role-playing video games and, more recently, the non-digital series The Mechanic is the Message. She has worked in game development since 1981 and has credits on 49 game titles.
An independent video game or indie game is a video game typically created by individuals or smaller development teams without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher, in contrast to most "AAA" (triple-A) games. However, the "indie" term may apply to other scenarios where the development of the game has some measure of independence from a publisher even if a publishers helps fund and distribute a game, such as creative freedom. Because of their independence and freedom to develop, indie games often focus on innovation, experimental gameplay, and taking risks not usually afforded in AAA games, and may explore the medium to produce unique experiences in art games. Indie games tend to be sold through digital distribution channels rather than at retail due to lack of publisher support. The term is synonymous with that of independent music or independent film in those respective mediums.
Lindsay Grace is a video game designer, artist, professor, and writer who currently lives in Miami, FL. He is best known as an academic game designer who employs critical design. He is the 2019 Games for Change Vanguard Award winner. He serves as director of the American University Game Lab and Studio (JOLT), which includes the Fake News game, Factitious and the NPR game Commuter Challenge. In 2013 his game, Wait was inducted in the Games for Change Hall of Fame as one of the five most significant games for change in the last decade. Created in 2009, players must navigate a 3D world that fades away when the player moves, and grows more detailed as they wait. If players fail to move for long, the world also recedes. Other notable games include Big Huggin', a game controlled by a giant stuffed animal that players must hug to meet game goals. Big Huggin' was Kickstarted with notable support from Jane McGonigal and selected for the ACM SIGGRAPH's Aesthetics of Gameplay Show.
AtariAge is a website focusing on classic Atari video games. The site features gaming news, historical archives, discussion forums, and an online store. It was founded in 1998.
A sandbox game is a video game with a gameplay element that gives the player a great degree of creativity to complete tasks towards a goal within the game, if such a goal exists. Some games exist as pure sandbox games with no objectives. these are also known as non-games or software toys. More commonly, sandbox games results from these creative elements being incorporated into other genres and allowing for emergent gameplay. Sandbox games are often associated with open world concepts which gives the player freedom of movement and progression in the game's world. The "sandbox" term derives from the nature of a sandbox that lets children create nearly anything they want within it.
Kellee Santiago is a Venezuelan American video game designer and producer. She is the co-founder and former president of thatgamecompany. Santiago was born in Caracas, Venezuela and was raised in Richmond, Virginia, where she played video games from a young age and was encouraged by her software engineer father to experiment with computers. While attending New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, she became active in experimental theater, and intended to pursue it after earning a master's degree in the Interactive Media Program of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. While there, however, she became involved in video game design, and produced Cloud, a game developed by Jenova Chen and a student team. Its success sparked her and Chen to found thatgamecompany upon graduating, and she became the president.
Robin Hunicke is an American video game designer and producer. She is a professor of game design at UC Santa Cruz and the co-founder of Funomena.
The Indie Fund is an organization created by several independent game developers to help fund budding indie video game development. The Indie Fund was created in early 2010, its purpose aimed "to encourage the next generation of game developers" by providing them funding for development of these games without the terms that would normally be associated with publication agreements.
Philippe Poisson, better known as Phil Fish, is a French-Canadian former indie game designer best known for his work on the 2012 platform game Fez. He was born and raised in Quebec, where his experiences with Nintendo games in his youth would later influence his game design. He studied game design at the Montreal National Animation and Design Centre, and worked at Ubisoft and Artificial Mind and Movement before starting Polytron in 2008.
William Timothy Rogers Jr. is an American video game journalist and developer. In games journalism, he is known for his association with mid-2000s New Games Journalism, his verbose writing style, and his video game reviews website ActionButton.net. The Guardian cited his 2005 opinion piece "Dreaming in an empty room: a defense of Metal Gear Solid 2" as a core example of New Games Journalism, a style of video game journalism that emphasizes the author's subjective and personal experiences in relation to the game world. Rogers has also written for Next Generation, GamesTM, Play, Game Developer, and Kotaku.
