The Most Famous

GAME DESIGNERS from United States

This page contains a list of the greatest American Game Designers. The pantheon dataset contains 77 Game Designers, 25 of which were born in United States. This makes United States the birth place of the most number of Game Designers.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary American Game Designers of all time. This list of famous American Game Designers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of American Game Designers.

1. Jeff Kinney (b. 1971)

With an HPI of 58.29, Jeff Kinney is the most famous American Game Designer. His biography has been translated into 42 different languages on wikipedia.

Jeffrey Patrick Kinney (born February 19, 1971) is an American author and cartoonist. He is best known for creating, writing and illustrating the children's book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He also created the child-oriented website Poptropica.

2. Gabe Newell (b. 1962)

With an HPI of 57.76, Gabe Newell is the 2nd most famous American Game Designer. His biography has been translated into 54 different languages.

Gabe Logan Newell (born November 3, 1962), also known by his nickname Gaben, is an American businessman. He 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. In 1996, he and another employee, Mike Harrington, left Microsoft to found Valve and fund the development of their first game, Half-Life (1998). Harrington left in 2000. Newell led the development of Valve's digital distribution service, Steam, which was launched in 2003 and controlled most of the market for downloaded PC games by 2011. As of 2021, Newell owned at least one quarter of Valve. He has been estimated as one of the wealthiest people in the United States and the wealthiest person in the video games industry, with a net worth of $9.5 billion as of 2024. He is also the owner of the marine research organization Inkfish and the neuroscience company Starfish Neuroscience.

3. Lizzie Magie (1866 - 1948)

With an HPI of 55.22, Lizzie Magie is the 3rd most famous American Game Designer. Her biography has been translated into 29 different languages.

Elizabeth J. Magie Phillips (née Magie; May 9, 1866 – March 2, 1948) was an American game designer, writer, feminist, and Georgist. She invented The Landlord's Game, the precursor to Monopoly, to illustrate teachings of the progressive era economist Henry George.

4. Gary Gygax (1938 - 2008)

With an HPI of 51.06, Gary Gygax is the 4th most famous American Game Designer. His biography has been translated into 29 different languages.

Ernest Gary Gygax ( GHY-gaks; July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating the pioneering tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson. In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con gaming convention. In 1971, he co-developed Chainmail, a miniatures wargame based on medieval warfare with Jeff Perren. He co-founded the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) with childhood friend Don Kaye in 1973. The next year, TSR published D&D, created by Gygax and Arneson the year before. In 1976, he founded The Dragon, a magazine based around the new game. In 1977, he began work on a more comprehensive version of the game called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He designed numerous manuals for the game system, as well as several pre-packaged adventures called "modules" that gave a person running a D&D game (the "Dungeon Master") a rough script and ideas. In 1983, he worked to license the D&D product line into the successful D&D cartoon series. Gygax left TSR in 1986 over conflicts with its new majority owner, but he continued to create role-playing game titles independently, beginning with the multi-genre Dangerous Journeys in 1992. He designed the Lejendary Adventure gaming system, released in 1999. In 2005, he was involved in the Castles & Crusades role-playing game, which was conceived as a hybrid between the third edition of D&D and the original version of the game. In 2004, he had two strokes and narrowly avoided a subsequent heart attack; he was then diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm and died in March 2008 at age 69. Following Gygax's funeral, many mourners formed an impromptu game event which became known as Gary Con 0, and gamers celebrate in Lake Geneva each March with a large role-playing game convention in Gygax's honor.

5. Dave Arneson (1947 - 2009)

With an HPI of 47.90, Dave Arneson is the 5th most famous American Game Designer. His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

David Lance Arneson (; October 1, 1947 – April 7, 2009) was an American game designer best known for co-developing the first published role-playing game (RPG), Dungeons & Dragons, with Gary Gygax, in the early 1970s. Arneson's early work was fundamental to the role-playing game (RPG) genre, pioneering devices now considered to be archetypical, such as cooperative play to develop a storyline instead of individual competitive play to "win" and adventuring in dungeon, town, and wilderness settings as presented by a neutral judge who doubles as the voice and consciousness of all characters aside from the player characters. Arneson discovered wargaming as a teenager in the 1960s, and he began combining these games with the concept of role-playing. He was a University of Minnesota student when he met Gygax at the Gen Con gaming convention in the late 1960s. In 1971, Arneson created the game and fictional world that became Blackmoor, writing his own rules and basing the setting on medieval fantasy elements. Arneson took the game to Gygax as the representative for game publisher Guidon Games, and the pair co-developed a set of rules that became Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Gygax and Donald Kaye subsequently founded Tactical Studies Rules in 1973, which published Dungeons & Dragons the next year. Arneson moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to work for TSR Hobbies in 1976, but left before the end of the year. In 1979 Arneson filed suit to retain credits and royalties on the game. He continued to work as an independent game designer, including work submitted to TSR in the 1980s, and continued to play games for his entire life. Arneson also did some work in computer programming, and he taught computer game design and game rules design at Full Sail University from the 1990s until shortly before his death in 2009.

6. Carol Shaw (b. 1955)

With an HPI of 47.39, Carol Shaw is the 6th most famous American Game Designer. Her biography has been translated into 21 different languages.

Carol Shaw (born 1955) is one of the first female game designers and programmers in the video game industry. She is best known for creating the Atari 2600 vertically scrolling shooter game River Raid (1982) for Activision. She worked for Atari, Inc. from 1978 to 1980, where she designed multiple games including 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe (1978) and Video Checkers (1980), both for the Atari VCS before it was renamed to the 2600. She left game development in 1984 and retired in 1990.

7. Will Wright (b. 1960)

With an HPI of 47.12, Will Wright is the 7th most famous American Game Designer. His biography has been translated into 31 different languages.

William Ralph Wright (born January 20, 1960) is an American video game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, which later became part of Electronic Arts. In April 2009, he left EA to run Stupid Fun Club Camp, an entertainment think tank in which Wright and EA are principal shareholders. The first computer game Wright designed was Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984, but it was SimCity that brought him to prominence. The game was published by Maxis, which Wright co-formed with Jeff Braun. Wright continued to innovate on the game's central theme of simulation with numerous other titles including SimEarth and SimAnt. Wright has earned many awards for his work in game design. He is best known for being the original designer of The Sims series, of which Maxis developed the first entry in 2000. The game spawned multiple sequels, including The Sims 2, The Sims 3, The Sims 4 and their expansion packs. His latest work, Spore, released in September 2008 and features gameplay based upon the model of evolution and scientific advancement. The game sold 406,000 copies within three weeks of its release. In 2007, he became the first game designer to receive the BAFTA Fellowship, which had previously only been presented to those in the film and television industries.

8. Scott Cawthon (b. 1971)

With an HPI of 46.90, Scott Cawthon is the 8th most famous American Game Designer. His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

Scott Braden Cawthon is an American video game developer, writer, and producer. He is best known for creating Five Nights at Freddy's, a series of survival horror video games which expanded into a media franchise. Cawthon began his career developing family-friendly Christian video games to minimal success. He transitioned to horror with the first Five Nights at Freddy's game in 2014, which was a commercial success and gained a cult following. Cawthon developed seven games in the main series and four spin-offs as of 2023. Outside of the games, Cawthon wrote several stories for the franchise, including novels and the screenplay for the Five Nights at Freddy's film (2023), which he also produced.

9. John Carmack (b. 1970)

With an HPI of 46.45, John Carmack is the 9th most famous American Game Designer. His biography has been translated into 37 different languages.

John D. Carmack II (born August 21, 1970) is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels. Carmack made innovations in 3D computer graphics, such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes. In 2013, he resigned from id Software to work full-time at Oculus VR as their CTO. In 2019, he reduced his role to Consulting CTO so he could allocate more time toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). In 2022, he left Oculus to work on his AGI startup, Keen Technologies.

10. John Romero (b. 1967)

With an HPI of 45.28, John Romero is the 10th most famous American Game Designer. His biography has been translated into 29 different languages.

Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967) is an American video game developer. He co-founded 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 the id 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, he and another former id employee, Tom Hall, founded Monkeystone Games to develop games for mobile devices. In 2003, Romero joined Midway Games as the project lead on Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows (2005), and left shortly before its release. He founded another company, Gazillion Entertainment, in 2005. In 2016, Romero and another former id employee, Adrian Carmack, announced a new FPS, Blackroom, but it was canceled after it failed to gain funding.

People

Pantheon has 29 people classified as American game designers born between 1866 and 1978. Of these 29, 26 (89.66%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living American game designers include Jeff Kinney, Gabe Newell, and Carol Shaw. The most famous deceased American game designers include Lizzie Magie, Gary Gygax, and Dave Arneson. As of April 2024, 4 new American game designers have been added to Pantheon including Amy Hennig, Jonathan Blow, and Rob Pardo.