Portal:Video games

Myst is an adventure video game designed by Rand and Robyn Miller. It was developed by Cyan, Inc., published by Broderbund, and first released in 1993 for the Macintosh. In the game, the player travels via a special book to a mysterious island called Myst. The player interacts with objects and traverses the environment by clicking on pre-rendered imagery. Solving puzzles allows the player to travel to other worlds ("Ages"), which reveal the backstory of the game's characters and help the player make the choice of whom to aid.

The Miller brothers had started in game development creating black-and-white, largely plotless works aimed at children. They wanted Myst to be a graphically impressive game with a nonlinear story and mystery elements aimed at adults. The game's design was limited by the small memory footprint of video game consoles and by the slow speed of CD-ROM drives. The game was created on Apple Macintosh computers and ran on the HyperCard software stack, though ports to other platforms subsequently required the creation of a new engine.

Myst was a critical and commercial success. Critics lauded the ability of the game to immerse players in its fictional worlds. It has been called one of the most influential and best video games ever made. Selling more than six million copies, Myst was the best-selling PC game for nearly a decade. The game helped drive adoption of the CD-ROM drive, spawned a multimedia franchise, and inspired clones, parodies, and new video game genres, as well as spin-off novels and other media. The game has been ported to multiple platforms and remade multiple times. (Full article...)

Roberta Lynn Williams (née Heuer; born February 16, 1953) is an American video game designer and writer, who co-founded Sierra On-Line with her husband, game developer Ken Williams. In 1980, her first game, Mystery House, became a modest commercial success; it is credited as the first graphic adventure game. She is also known for creating and maintaining the King's Quest series, as well as designing the full motion video game Phantasmagoria in 1995.

Sierra was acquired by CUC International in 1996, leading to layoffs and management changes. Williams took a brief sabbatical, and returned to the company in a game design role, but grew increasingly frustrated with CUC's creative and business decisions. After the release of King's Quest: Mask of Eternity in 1998, she left the game industry in 1999 and focused her retirement on traveling and writing historical fiction. In 2021 she released her historical novel, Farewell to Tara. Soon after, she returned to game development with the 3D remake of the classic adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure, released in January 2023 as Colossal Cave.

Several publications have named Roberta Williams as one of the best or most influential creators in the video game industry, for co-founding Sierra, pioneering the graphic adventure game genre, and creating the King's Quest series. Several publications have called her the "Queen of adventure games". She has received the Industry Icon Award from The Game Awards, and the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards. (Full article...)

In the Halo universe, an Arbiter is a ceremonial, religious, and political rank bestowed upon Covenant Elites. In the 2004 video game Halo 2, the rank is given to a disgraced commander named Thel 'Vadam as a way to atone for his failures. Although the Arbiter is intended to die serving the Covenant leadership, the High Prophets, he survives his missions and the Prophets' subsequent betrayal of his kind. When he learns that the Prophets' plans would doom all sentient life in the galaxy, the Arbiter allies with the Covenant's enemies (humans) and stops the ringworld Halo from being activated. The Arbiter is a playable character in Halo 2 and its 2007 sequel Halo 3. The character also appears in Halo 5: Guardians and additional expanded universe material. A different Arbiter, Ripa 'Moramee appears in the 2009 real-time strategy game Halo Wars, which takes place 20 years before the events of the main trilogy.

The appearance of the Arbiter in Halo 2 and the change in perspective from the main human protagonist Master Chief to a former enemy was a plot twist Halo developer Bungie kept highly secret. The character's name was changed from "Dervish" after concerns that the name reinforced a perceived United States-versus-Islam allegory in the game's plot. Actor Keith David lends his voice to the character in Halo 2, 3, and 5, while David Sobolov voices the Arbiter of Halo Wars.

The Arbiter has appeared as action figures and other collectibles and marketing, in addition to appearances in the games. Bungie intended the sudden point of view switch to a member of the Covenant as a plot twist that no one would have seen coming, but the character in particular and the humanization of the Covenant in general was not evenly received by critics and fans. Computer and Video Games derided the Arbiter's missions as some of the worst parts of Halo 2. Conversely, IGN lamented the loss of the Arbiter's story in Halo 3 and missed the added dimension the character provided to the story. (Full article...)

is a Japanese anime television series based on Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog video game series. Produced by TMS Entertainment under partnership with Sega and Sonic Team, and directed by Hajime Kamegaki, Sonic X initially ran for 52 episodes, broadcasting on TV Tokyo from April 2003 to March 2004. A further 26 episodes aired in North America, Europe, and the Middle East from 2005 to 2006. The American localization and broadcasting were handled by 4Kids Entertainment, which edited it and created new music.

The series follows a group of anthropomorphic animals that accidentally teleport from their home planet to Earth after attempting to save one of their friends from their enemy Doctor Eggman. Separated, Sonic the Hedgehog is saved by a human boy named Chris Thorndyke, who helps him find his friends while repeatedly scuffling with Doctor Eggman and his robots over control of the powerful Chaos Emeralds, and becoming celebrities. The final story arc sees Sonic and his friends return with Chris to their world, where they enter outer space with a newfound plant-like creature named Cosmo and fight an army of aliens called the Metarex. (Full article...)

Knight Lore is a 1984 action-adventure game developed and published by Ultimate Play the Game, and written by company founders Chris and Tim Stamper. The game is known for its use of isometric graphics, which it further popularized in video games. In Knight Lore, the player character Sabreman has forty days to collect objects throughout a castle and brew a cure to his werewolf curse. Each castle room is depicted in monochrome on its own screen and consists of blocks to climb, obstacles to avoid, and puzzles to solve.

Ultimate released Knight Lore third in the Sabreman series but later claimed to have completed it first and withheld its release for a year to position the company advantageously in anticipation of the game's effect on the market. Knight Lore's novel image masking technique, Filmation, let images appear to pass atop and behind each other without their contents colliding. This created the illusion of depth priority, which the computer did not natively support. By delaying Knight Lore's release, Ultimate protected sales of their then-upcoming Sabre Wulf and created another Filmation game before other developers could copy the style. Ultimate released the original Sabreman trilogy in quick succession in 1984 for the ZX Spectrum. Knight Lore came last, in November. Ports followed for the BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, MSX, and Family Computer Disk System.

Knight Lore is regarded as a seminal work in British video game history and has been included in multiple lists of top Spectrum games. Critics considered its technical solutions and isometric 3D style a harbinger of future game design. They praised the game's controls and atmosphere of mystery, but noted its difficult gameplay and criticised its sound and occasional graphical slowdown. Knight Lore was named the 1984 game of the year by the Golden Joystick Awards and Popular Computing Weekly readers. Though it was not the first isometric 3D video game, Knight Lore popularised the format. When the isometric, flip-screen style fell out of fashion, Knight Lore's influence persisted in computer role-playing games. Retrospective reviewers remember the game as the first to offer an exploratory "world" rather than a flat surface, but consider its controls outdated and frustrating in the thirty years since its release. (Full article...)

Conan is a 2007 action-adventure game developed by Nihilistic Software and published by THQ for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Players take control of the titular hero, Conan the Barbarian, from Robert E. Howard's fantasy literature.

In Conan, the hero is on a quest to recover his lost armor and defeat an evil wizard. Conan can fight with sword and shield, two-handed weapons, or a weapon in each hand. Starting with several basic attacks, the barbarian gains experience points by killing enemies. By exchanging these points for additional attacks, players improve the hero's fighting abilities. Magic powers complement Conan's arsenal, including the abilities to turn enemies into stone and conjure firestorms. The game also features context-sensitive action sequences in which players press a sequence of buttons displayed on the screen to complete actions such as killing powerful enemies and interacting with the environment.

Critics enjoyed Conan's combat system and gory kills, but said the game failed to match the experience offered in God of War. Reactions varied on the game's depiction of the Conan universe; several critics praised the emulation of Frank Frazetta's famous artwork, but others found the game's graphics drab and of low resolution. Regarding the audio, Golden Globe-winning actor Ron Perlman was both praised and criticized for his voice work as Conan. Composer Mike Reagan received acclaim for the game's music and later gave live performances of the game's soundtrack at Video Games Live shows. Despite the average reviews and commercial success of the Conan franchise, Conan sold poorly and was a financial loss for THQ. (Full article...)

Guitar Hero is a 2005 rhythm game developed by Harmonix and published by RedOctane for the PlayStation 2. It is the first installment in the Guitar Hero series. Guitar Hero was released in November 2005 in North America, April 2006 in Europe and June 2006 in Australia. The game's development was a result of collaboration between RedOctane and Harmonix to bring a Guitar Freaks-like game to United States.

The game features a guitar-shaped controller (resembling a miniature Gibson SG) that the player uses to simulate playing rock music. The gameplay is similar to GuitarFreaks, in that the player presses buttons on the guitar controller in time with musical notes that scroll on the game screen. The game features covers of 30 popular rock songs spanning five decades of rock, from the 1960s up through 2005, in addition to bonus tracks. Guitar Hero became a surprise hit, earning critical acclaim and winning many awards from major video game publications, and is considered one of the most influential games of its decade. The game's success launched the Guitar Hero franchise, which has earned more than $2 billion in sales, spawning several sequels, expansions, and other game-related products. (Full article...)

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a 2004 adventure game developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the GameCube. The sequel to Metroid Prime (2002) and the first Metroid game with a multiplayer feature, Echoes was released in North America, Europe and Australia in 2004 and in Japan under the name Metroid Prime 2: Dark Echoes in May 2005.

The story follows bounty hunter Samus Aran after she is sent to rescue Galactic Federation Marines from a ship near Aether, a planet inhabited by a race known as the Luminoth. She discovers that the troops were slaughtered by the Ing, a hostile race that came from an alternate dimension of Aether. Samus must travel to four temples to ensure the destruction of the evil Ing, while battling them, wild creatures, Space Pirates, and her mysterious doppelgänger Dark Samus.

Retro sought to differentiate Echoes with a heavier focus on story-telling and new gameplay mechanics. Nintendo launched a viral marketing campaign that included several websites written as if taking place in the Metroid universe. The single-player mode was acclaimed for its graphics, atmosphere and music, though its steep difficulty and multiplayer mode were met less positively. (Full article...)

Marble Madness is an arcade video game designed by Mark Cerny and published by Atari Games in 1984. It is a platform game in which the player must guide a marble through six courses, populated with obstacles and enemies, within a time limit. The player controls the marble by using a trackball. Marble Madness is known for using innovative game technologies: it was Atari's first to use the Atari System 1 hardware, the first to be programmed in the C programming language, and one of the first to use true stereo sound (previous games used either monaural sound or simulated stereo).

In designing the game, Cerny drew inspiration from miniature golf, racing games, and artwork by M. C. Escher. He aimed to create a game that offered a distinct experience with a unique control system. Cerny applied a minimalist approach in designing the appearance of the game's courses and enemies. Throughout development, he was frequently impeded by limitations in technology and had to forgo several design ideas.

Upon its release in arcades, Marble Madness was commercially successful and profitable. Critics praised the game's difficulty, unique visual design, and stereo soundtrack. The game was ported to numerous platforms and inspired the development of other games. A sequel was developed and planned for release in 1991, but canceled when location testing showed the game could not succeed in competition with other titles. (Full article...)

Proteus is a 2013 adventure game designed and created by Ed Key and David Kanaga for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. In the game, the player traverses a procedurally generated environment without prescribed goals. The world's flora and fauna emit unique musical signatures, combinations of which cause dynamic shifts in audio based on the player's surroundings.

The game began development in 2008. Key first conceived Proteus as an open-ended role-playing game akin to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion but, because of the work required for such a project, later redesigned it to be "nontraditional and nonviolent". Audio designer and composer David Kanaga joined the project in 2010. Versions for the PlayStation 3 video game console and Vita handheld console were developed by Curve Studios, whose team added new gameplay features to the Vita edition at Sony's request.

Proteus won the prize for Best Audio at the 2011 IndieCade awards, and was a finalist for the 2012 Independent Games Festival's Nuovo Award. Following its release, critics praised the game, especially for its audio features, although some criticised the game's brevity and limited replayability. The game was frequently mentioned in discussions of video games as art, with some debating whether it could be considered a video game at all. (Full article...)

Hideo Kojima (小島 秀夫, Kojima Hideo, born August 24, 1963) is a Japanese video game designer. He is regarded as an auteur of video games. He developed a strong passion for film and literature during his childhood and adolescence. In 1986, he was hired by Konami, for which he designed and wrote Metal Gear (1987) for the MSX2, a game that laid the foundations for stealth games and the Metal Gear series, his best known and most appreciated works. At Konami, he also produced the Zone of the Enders series, as well as wrote and designed Snatcher (1988) and Policenauts (1994), graphic adventure games regarded for their cinematic presentation.

Kojima founded Kojima Productions within Konami in 2005, and he was appointed vice president of Konami Digital Entertainment in 2011. Following his departure from Konami in 2015, he refounded Kojima Productions as an independent studio; his first game outside Konami, Death Stranding, was released in 2019. (Full article...)

Peter Douglas Molyneux OBE (/ˈmɒlɪnjuː/; born 5 May 1959) is an English video game designer and programmer. He created the god games Populous, Dungeon Keeper, and Black & White, as well as Theme Park, the Fable series, Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?, and Godus. In 2012 he founded and currently runs 22cans, a video game development studio.

In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time. (Full article...)

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (born April 16, 1955) is a Russian computer engineer and video game designer who is best known for creating, designing, and developing Tetris in 1985 while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre under the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (now the Russian Academy of Sciences). After Tetris was released internationally in 1987, he released a sequel in 1989, entitled Welltris.

In 1991, he moved to the United States and later became a U.S. citizen. In 1996, Pajitnov founded The Tetris Company alongside Dutch video game designer Henk Rogers. Despite the game's high popularity, Pajitnov did not receive royalties from Tetris prior to this time, with the Soviet government being the only Russians who had made money from it. (Full article...)

Yoko Kanno (菅野 よう子, Kanno Yōko, born 18 March 1963) is a Japanese composer, arranger and music producer of soundtracks for anime series, video games, television dramas and movies. She has written scores for Cowboy Bebop, Terror in Resonance, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Wolf's Rain, Turn A Gundam and Darker than Black. Kanno is a keyboardist and the frontwoman for Seatbelts, who perform many of her compositions. (Full article...)

Richard Allan Bartle FBCS FRSA (born 10 January 1960) is a British writer, professor and game researcher in the massively multiplayer online game industry. He co-created MUD1 (the first MUD) in 1978, and is the author of the 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds. (Full article...)

Gunpei Yokoi (横井 軍平, Yokoi Gunpei, September 10, 1941 – October 4, 1997), sometimes transliterated as Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese toy maker and video game designer. As a long-time Nintendo employee, he was best known as creator of the Game & Watch handheld system, inventor of the cross-shaped Control Pad, the original designer of the Game Boy, and producer of a few long-running and critically acclaimed video game franchises such as Metroid and Kid Icarus. (Full article...)

Jordan Mechner (born June 4, 1964) is an American video game designer, graphic novelist, author, screenwriter, filmmaker, and former video game programmer. A major figure in the development of cinematic video games and a pioneer in video game animation, he began his career designing and programming the 1984 martial arts game Karateka for the Apple II while a student at Yale University. The game was a bestseller. He followed it with the platform game Prince of Persia five years later; it was widely ported and became a hit. Both games used rotoscoping, where actors shot on film by Mechner were drawn over to create in-game animation. Prince of Persia has become the basis for a long-running franchise, including a 2010 live-action film released by Walt Disney Pictures and an ongoing series of video games, published by Ubisoft.

Mechner is the recipient of many accolades, including the 2017 GDC Pioneer Award. His works are often included in all-time lists of the game industry's best and most influential titles. (Full article...)

Gabe Logan Newell (born November 3, 1962), also known by his nickname Gaben, is an American businessman who is the president and co-founder of the video game company Valve Corporation.

Newell was born in Colorado and grew up in Davis, California. He attended Harvard University in the early 1980s but dropped out to join Microsoft, where he helped create the first versions of the Windows operating system. He and another employee, Mike Harrington, left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve, and funded the development of their first game, Half-Life (1998). Harrington left in 2000. (Full article...)

Jeremy Soule (/ˈsoʊl/; born December 19, 1975) is an American composer of soundtracks for film, television, and video games. He has composed soundtracks for over 60 games and over a dozen other works during his career, including The Elder Scrolls, Guild Wars, Icewind Dale, and the Harry Potter series.

He became an employee of Square in 1994 after several years of private composition studies. After finishing the soundtrack to Secret of Evermore in 1995, he left to join Humongous Entertainment, where he composed for several children's games as well as Total Annihilation, his first award-winning score. In 2000, he left to form his own music production company, Soule Media, now called Artistry Entertainment. In 2005, he founded DirectSong, a record label that published digital versions of his soundtracks as well as those of classical composers. DirectSong remained active until 2019. (Full article...)

Sidney K. Meier (/ˈmaɪər/ MIRE; born February 24, 1954) is an American businessman and computer programmer. A programmer, designer, and producer of several strategy video games and simulation video games, including the Civilization series, Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 with Bill Stealey and is the Director of Creative Development of Firaxis Games, which he co-founded with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds in 1996. For his contributions to the video game industry, Meier was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. (Full article...)

Nobuo Uematsu (植松 伸夫, Uematsu Nobuo, born March 21, 1959) is a Japanese composer and keyboardist best known for his contributions to the Final Fantasy video game series by Square Enix. A self-taught musician, he began playing the piano at the age of twelve, with English singer-songwriter Elton John as one of his biggest influences.

Uematsu joined Square in 1986, where he first met Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. The two later worked together on many games at the company, most notably in the Final Fantasy series. After nearly two decades with Square, Uematsu left in 2004 to create his own production company and music label, Dog Ear Records. He has since composed music as a freelancer for other games, including ones developed by Square Enix and Sakaguchi's studio Mistwalker. (Full article...)

James D. Rolfe (born July 10, 1980) is an American YouTuber, filmmaker, and actor. He is best known for creating and starring in the comedic retrogaming web series The Angry Video Game Nerd (2004–present). His spin-off projects include reviews of retro films, television series, and board games. He is considered a pioneer of internet gaming videos, and is noted for his widespread influence on YouTube content after the series premiered on the site in 2006.

Rolfe began creating homemade video productions in the late 1980s, having created more than 270 videos and short films by 2004. Among these were the first Angry Video Game Nerd (originally known as Bad NES Games, and later Angry Nintendo Nerd) episodes, which were subsequently released on his Cinemassacre website that same year. Two years later, he gained mainstream attention after the series went viral upon being published to YouTube. Following its success, Rolfe released a feature-length film based on the series in 2014, which was met with generally mixed reception. (Full article...)

Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967) is an American director, designer, programmer and developer in the video game industry. He is a co-founder of id Software and designed their early games, including Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993), Doom II (1994), Hexen (1995) and Quake (1996). His designs and development tools, along with programming techniques developed by id Software's lead programmer, John Carmack, popularized the first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Romero is also credited with coining the multiplayer term "deathmatch".

Following disputes with Carmack, Romero was fired from id in 1996. He co-founded a new studio, Ion Storm, and directed the FPS Daikatana (2000), which was a critical and commercial failure. Romero departed Ion Storm in 2001. In July 2001, Romero and another former id employee, Tom Hall, founded Monkeystone Games to develop games for mobile devices. (Full article...)

Tomohiro Nishikado (西角 友宏, Nishikado Tomohiro, born March 31, 1944) is a Japanese video game developer and engineer. He is the creator of the arcade shoot 'em up game Space Invaders, released to the public in 1978 by the Taito Corporation of Japan, often credited as the first shoot 'em up and for beginning the golden age of arcade video games. Prior to Space Invaders, he also designed other earlier Taito arcade games, including the shooting electro-mechanical games Sky Fighter (1971) and Sky Fighter II, the sports video game TV Basketball in 1974, the vertical scrolling racing video game Speed Race (also known as Wheels) in 1974, the multi-directional shooter Western Gun (also known as Gun Fight) in 1975, and the first-person combat flight simulator Interceptor (1975). (Full article...)

Tōru Iwatani (岩谷 徹, Iwatani Tōru, born January 25, 1955) is a Japanese video game designer who spent much of his career working for Namco. He is best known as the creator of the arcade game Pac-Man (1980). In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time. (Full article...)

John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney. As an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. Thompson gained recognition as an anti-video game activist, criticizing the content of video games and their alleged effects on children. He also targeted rap music and radio personality Howard Stern.

Thompson's legal career was further recognized for his actions against The Florida Bar, including challenging its constitutionality in 1993. In 2008, he was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants. (Full article...)

Markus Alexej Persson (/ˈmɑːrkəs ˈpɪərsən/ ^ⓘ, Swedish: [ˈmǎrkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ^ⓘ; born 1 June 1979), also known as "Notch", is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is the creator of the video game Minecraft, which since its release has become the best-selling video game in history. He founded the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009.

Persson began developing video games at an early age, making games both professionally and for pleasure for much of his life. His commercial success began after publishing an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over ten million copies. After this point, Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014, Persson announced on his personal website that he had concluded he "", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. Persson left Mojang in November of that year, selling his company to Microsoft for a reported US$2.5 billion. The acquisition made Persson a billionaire. (Full article...)

Lim Yo-hwan (Korean: 임요환, born September 4, 1980), known online as SlayerS_'BoxeR' (usually shortened to BoxeR), is a former professional player of the real-time strategy computer game StarCraft. He is often referred to as The Terran Emperor, or simply The Emperor, and is widely considered to be one of the most successful players of the genre as well as a pop culture icon.

Lim won his first StarCraft: Brood War tournament in 1999. From 2001 to 2002, he won multiple major championships, including two OnGameNet Starleague titles and two World Cyber Games gold medals. In 2002, he also created the team Team Orion, which later became SK Telecom T1 (SKT T1) in 2004. He began his compulsory military service in 2006, where he played on South Korea's newly formed Air Force esports team Airforce Challenge E-sports. In late 2010, he retired from StarCraft: Brood War and founded the StarCraft II team SlayerS. He then briefly returned to SKT T1 as a coach in 2012 before retiring due to health related issues. Lim finished his playing career with a record of 603 wins and 430 losses (58.4%). (Full article...)

Sidney K. Meier (/ˈmaɪər/ MIRE; born February 24, 1954) is an American businessman and computer programmer. A programmer, designer, and producer of several strategy video games and simulation video games, including the Civilization series, Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 with Bill Stealey and is the Director of Creative Development of Firaxis Games, which he co-founded with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds in 1996. For his contributions to the video game industry, Meier was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. (Full article...)

Akira Toriyama (Japanese: 鳥山明, Hepburn: Toriyama Akira, April 5, 1955 – March 1, 2024) was a Japanese manga artist and character designer. He first achieved mainstream recognition for creating the popular manga series Dr. Slump, before going on to create Dragon Ball (his most famous work) and acting as a character designer for several popular video games such as the Dragon Quest series, Chrono Trigger, and Blue Dragon. Toriyama came to be regarded as one of the most important authors in the history of manga with his works highly influential and popular, particularly Dragon Ball, which many manga artists cite as a source of inspiration.

He earned the 1981 Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen/shōjo manga with Dr. Slump, and it went on to sell over 35 million copies in Japan. It was adapted into a successful anime series, with a second anime created in 1997, 13 years after the manga ended. (Full article...)

Nolan North (born October 31, 1970) is an American actor best known for his voice acting roles.

After his breakthrough role as Dr. Chris Ramsey on the ABC soap opera Port Charles in 1997, North moved into voice acting when the show ended in 2003 and has since become best known for his video game roles as Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series, Desmond Miles in the Assassin's Creed series, Merasmus in Team Fortress 2, the Prince in Prince of Persia, Dr. Edward Richtofen in the Call of Duty franchise, Deadpool in various Marvel Comics media, the Penguin in the Batman: Arkham franchise, Captain Martin Walker in Spec Ops: The Line, David in The Last of Us, himself as one of the voices for the player character in Saints Row IV, Tony Stark in Marvel's Avengers, and Ghost in the Destiny video game series. (Full article...)

William James Mitchell Jr. (born July 16, 1965) is an American video game player. He achieved fame throughout the 1980s and 1990s by claiming numerous records on classic video games, including a perfect score on Pac-Man. Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records recognized Mitchell as the holder of several records earned playing classic video games, and he has appeared in several documentaries on competitive gaming and retrogaming. However, in 2017, the legitimacy of a number of his records was called into question, leading to Twin Galaxies stripping Mitchell of his records.

Mitchell rose to national prominence in the 1980s when Life included him in a photo spread of game champions during the height of the golden age of arcade video games. In 1999, Mitchell was the first person to claim a perfect score of 3,333,360 points on the arcade game Pac-Man. A 2007 documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, follows his attempts to maintain the highest score on Donkey Kong after being challenged by newcomer Steve Wiebe. (Full article...)

Ken Kutaragi (久夛良木 健, Kutaragi Ken, born 2 August 1950) is a Japanese engineering technologist and businessman. He is the former chairman and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), the video game division of Sony Group Corporation, and current president and CEO of Cyber AI Entertainment. He is known as "The Father of the PlayStation", as he oversaw the development of the original console and its successors and spinoffs, including the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and the PlayStation 3. He departed Sony in 2007, a year after the PlayStation 3 was released.

He had also designed the sound processor for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. With Sony, he designed the VLSI chip which works in conjunction with the PS1's RISC CPU to handle the graphics rendering. (Full article...)

Hironobu Sakaguchi (坂口 博信, Sakaguchi Hironobu, born November 25, 1962) is a Japanese game designer, director, producer, and writer. Originally working for Square (later Square Enix) from 1983 to 2003, he departed the company and founded independent studio Mistwalker in 2004. He is known as the creator of the Final Fantasy franchise, in addition to other titles during his time at Square. At Mistwalker, he is known for creating the Blue Dragon and Terra Battle series among several standalone titles, moving away from home consoles and creating titles for mobile platforms.

Originally intending to become a musician, he briefly studied electronics and programming, joining Square as a part-time employee, then later a full-time employee when Square became an independent company in 1986. He led the development of several titles before helping to create the original Final Fantasy, which proved highly successful and cemented his status within the company. Following the financial failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, his debut as a film director, Sakaguchi withdrew from Square's management and eventually resigned in 2003. He continued his game career through Mistwalker, first co-developing projects through external partners and then smaller in-studio mobile projects. (Full article...)

Michael Morhaime (born November 3, 1967) is an American video game developer and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of Dreamhaven, located in Irvine, California. Morhaime is best known as the co-founder and the former president of Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc., that was founded in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse. He served on the Vivendi Games executive committee since January 1999, when Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. became a subsidiary of Vivendi Games. (Full article...)