Computer Game Designer

Jordan Mechner (born 1964) is a game programmer, game designer, and movie director. Mechner was born in New York City and graduated from Yale University in 1985. Mechner's first hit game was Karateka (1984), written while he was still an undergraduate. Prince of Persia, released in 1989, was noted for its fluid animation of human figures. Both titles were published by Brøderbund. For the animations used in Prince of Persia, Mechner spent days studying video and photographs of his brother...

Sidney K. Meier (born 1954 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American programmer and designer of several popular computer strategy game. Meier has won accolades for both his contributions to the computer games industry and for the titles that have gained huge commercial successes, such as a star on the Walk of Game. Sid Meier is a Director of Creative Development for computer game developer Firaxis Games, which he co-founded with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds in 1996. Sid Meier founded MicroProse...

Silas Warner (18 August 1949 – 3 March 2004) was a game programmer and the first employee of Muse Software. Among other games, he created Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. These two games inspired id Software to create Wolfenstein 3D, the game that popularized the first-person shooter genre. Warner was educated at Deep Springs College and Indiana University. He was a talented programmer, but lacked some social skills.Former coworkers state that he was a prototypical "geek" in...

Chris Crawford is a noted computer game designer and writer, responsible for a number of important games in the 1980s, for founding The Journal of Computer Game Design and for organizing the Computer Game Developers' Conference. After receiving a B.S. in physics from UC Davis in 1972 and an M.S. in physics from University of Missouri - Columbia in 1975, Crawford taught at a community college and the University of California, then turned his game design hobby into a profession at Atari in 1979,...

Chris Roberts (born May 27, 1968) is a computer game designer and programmer and a film producer and director. Often hailed as a visionary, he is best known for creating the popular Wing Commander series while employed at Origin Systems. Born in Redwood City, California, Roberts grew up in Manchester, England. He attended the same school, contemporarily with the computer music composer Martin Galway. As a teenager, he created several hit games for the BBC Micro, including Stryker's Run and...

Ken Williams (born October 1954) is an American game programmer and co-founder with his wife Roberta Williams of On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra On-Line. Roberta and Ken married at the age of 19 and have two children. The couple have been leading figures in the development of graphical adventure games. Their contribution to gaming was partially chronicled in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Ken was the president of Sierra until the company was sold to CUC in 1996....

Warren Spector is a veteran computer game designer. He is known for having worked to merge elements of role-playing games and first-person shooters. He currently resides in Austin, Texas with his wife, fantasy writer Caroline Spector. Spector earned his BS in Communications at Northwestern University and MA in Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas in Austin. Before entering the computer game industry, Spector worked for Steve Jackson Games producing role-playing game. Most notably, he...

Rand Miller (born January 17, 1959, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) co-founded Cyan (now Cyan Worlds) with brother Robyn Miller and became famous from the unexpected success of their computer game Myst, which remained the number one-selling game for the remainder of the 1990s. Rand also worked on the game's sequel, Riven, and later Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation, Myst V: End of Ages, realMyst, and Uru. The brothers also acted out parts in the game, with Robyn as Sirrus and Rand as...

Joe Ybarra (born ~1954) is one of the original game producer at Electronic Arts in 1982 (along with Stewart Bonn, Dave Evans, Susan Lee-Merrow and Pat Marriott), where the concept of a game producer was created by Trip Hawkins. During this time he produced several highly acclaimed computer games, including M.U.L.E. by Dani Bunten and Ozark Softscape, Seven Cities of Gold (also by Bunten), Starflight and Dr. J. and Larry Bird Go One on One by Eric Hammond. Ybarra was also the original producer...

Marc Blank is an American computer game designer and game programmer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first hit text adventure computer games, Zork. Blank first encountered Don Woods and Will Crowther's Adventure game while he was studying at MIT in the mid-1970s, where the game was played on mainframe computers. Blank was frustrated by the computer's tiny vocabulary; when it parsed user inputs very few words were recognized. After thinking about the problem...

Jon Van Caneghem is a computer game designer and producer. He is most recognized for creating the Might and Magic role-playing game series and its strategy spin-off Heroes of Might and Magic. Van Caneghem founded New World Computing in 1983. The company was acquired by The 3DO Company in 1996. When 3DO went bankrupt in 2003, New World Computing also disappeared. In 2004, Van Caneghem joined NCSoft. Shortly after, he was inducted into Computer Gaming World's Hall of Fame. In 2005 he left NCSoft...

Ken Levine is a founding member of, and creative director at 2K Boston, formerly known as Irrational Games. He previously worked at Looking Glass Studios, which he joined in 1995. He was born in New York. Some of the games he has worked on include Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2, Tribes: Vengeance, Freedom Force, its sequel Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, SWAT 4 and BioShock. Although 2K Boston will not be developing Bioshock 2, Levine will be working with 2K Marin on the game. ...

Michael Stemmle is a computer game writer, designer and director (sometimes designated as a "project leader" in LucasArts parlance) who co-created some of LucasArts' adventure game in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was also an uncredited script doctor on some non-adventure games. He joined LucasArts after graduating from Stanford University, where he honed his comedy skills writing halftime shows for the Stanford Band and skits for the annual stage musical Big Game Gaieties. After 14 years at...