Computer games have come a long way. During 1980’s the text/ASCII based games were popular. In the 1990’s the arcade games slowly transformed in to 3d games and by late 1990, prominent 3d games like Quake/Quake2/Unreal became popular than ever. These changes owe a lot to few greatest game programmers and designers that gaming industry has seen. Here is a partial list of game programmers and a tribute to them! Do help us grow the list. Comments are most appreciated.

Related Reading:

1. 10 Great Browser Games
2. 12 Free and Open Source 3D Games Part 1
3. 12 Free and Open Source 3D Games Part 2
4. Great Open Source City Building Games

• Alexey Pajitnov – A Russian computer engineer who co-authored the very famous Tetris in 1985.

• Michael Abrash – Prolific author of optimized graphic routines, expert on 8086 assembly, Game programming. He has created games like  Space Strike, PC Booter, Cosmic Crusader and up to a certain extent id Software’s Quake. He has authored famous books like Graphics Programming Black Book, Code Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Software That Pushes PCs to the Limit and many other technical write-ups.

• Scott Adams – He is the co-founder of Adventure International, an early publisher of games for home computers. He has developed many of early games like Adevntureland, Pirate Adventure etc for CP/M and MS-DOS. He was the first person known to create an adventure-style game for personal computers,way back in 1978.

• Ed Boon – He is famous as the co-creator of the Mortal Kombat franchise

• David Braben - co-creator of Elite – Space Trading computer game.

• Danielle Bunten Berry - developer of several early groundbreaking games, such as M.U.L.E. and The Seven Cities of Gold 

• John Carmack – He is probably the greatest game programmer who introduced us to first person shoot ‘em up 3D games. He is the programmer of many groundbreaking 3D games such as Wolfenstein 3D, the Doom series and the Quake series.

• Will Crowther - was the originator of Colossal Cave Adventure – the first ever Computer Adventure Game (1976)

• Richard Garriott (a.k.a. Lord British) – developer of the Ultima series among others
• Jordan Mechner – developer of several games with groundbreaking animation, such as Karateka and The Prince of Persia series

• Sid Meier - developer of numerous successful series, such as Civilization, Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, among others. Brian Reynolds also had been involved in Civilization games.

• Alan Miller - co-founder of the first independent console game publisher and programmer of several early Atari 2600 games 

• Robyn and Rand Miller - owners of Cyan Worlds, designers of Myst, Riven and other games

• Jeff Minter - founder of Llamasoft 

• Peter Molyneux - designer and programmer of Fable, Black & White, their sequels and Theme Park 

• Chris Sawyer - programmer and designer of Transport Tycoon series and Roller Coaster Tycoon 

• Ken Silverman - Creator of the Build Engine used first by Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood and later by many other games. Ken created his first 3D engine around the same time Carmack created the Doom engine.

• Tim Sweeney - Creator of the Unreal Engine and ZZT

• Anne Westfall - Programmer of all versions of home computer era game Archon. Joe Freeman is her husband, who is also a game programmer.

• Don Woods - was co-author of Colossal Cave Adventure
• Will Wright - programmer turned designer of most Sim- games including SimCity (City Building Game), The Sims (Life simulation game) and Spore.

• Shigeru Miyamoto – Japanese Video Game designer and producer. He is famous for several games like Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Animal Crossing, Pikmin and F-Zero.

• Hironobu Sakaguchi – Designer of Final Fantasy

for more, check out Computer Programmer