Nine Game Creators and the People Around Them

2024-02-13

I was in my last semester of college, sending applications everywhere. Having spent so much time playing games, I began to take seriously the idea of working for a game company.

I started looking for books about making games. This was one of the ones I found.

A Book About the People Who Make Games

The title promises nine creators. The book gives each of the nine a main profile, then introduces one or more other developers alongside them.

A profile of a Western developer often leads to someone working in Japan or Korea. The pairing is part of what makes the book worth reading.

Eight Hall of Fame Profiles and a Guest

Eight of the main figures had been inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. The ninth, Blizzard veteran Bill Roper, is presented by the book as a special guest. His place in the volume reflects what games such as StarCraft meant to readers in Korea.

The Developers You Meet

These are some of the games and creators the authors place alongside one another.

  1. Shigeru Miyamoto — Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda
  2. Lee Won-sul — Astonishia Story
  3. Sid Meier — Civilization
  4. Yōichi Erikawa — Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Uncharted Waters
  5. Kim Tae-gon — Gersang and Goonzu Online
  6. Hironobu Sakaguchi — Final Fantasy
  7. Yūji Horii — Dragon Quest
  8. Choi Yeon-gyu — The War of Genesis
  9. John Carmack — Doom and Quake
  10. Tim Sweeney — Unreal
  11. Song Jae-kyung — The Kingdom of the Winds and Lineage
  12. Will Wright — SimCity and The Sims
  13. Seo Kwan-hee — PangYa
  14. Yū Suzuki — Virtua Fighter and Sega’s Virtua series
  15. Bae Jae-hyun — Lineage II
  16. Peter Molyneux — Populous and the development of the god-game genre
  17. Hideo Kojima — Metal Gear Solid
  18. Jo Gi-yong — MU Online
  19. Richard Garriott — Ultima
  20. Kim Hak-kyu — Ragnarok Online
  21. Yoshiki Okamoto — Street Fighter
  22. Bill Roper — Blizzard’s Diablo, Warcraft and StarCraft games
  23. Jung Sang-won, also profiled in the book

You can recognize many of these games by name alone. Some helped set the direction of a genre. Others have lasted through enough sequels to be familiar to a later generation.

The authors use the major games to get at the decisions and circumstances behind them. They explain how the developers worked in a way that makes sense without a background in the industry.

Mathematics comes up in several of the profiles. So does the sustained interest that carries a person through the parts of the work nobody sees.

I was struck by how often a developer had to work out a form that did not yet have a standard way of being made. Once other people follow it, that first effort is easy to overlook.

I found the book while thinking about where to work. I came away wanting to know more about the people who had already spent years making the games I knew.

Book Information

Stories of Nine Leading Game Creators

Authors
Kim Jeong-nam and Kim Jeong-hyeon
Publication date
January 25, 2006
ISBN-13
9788972807445
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