DAY THREE
22: Yuuji Horii
Yūji Horii comes in today at #22 with sixteen points collected in two quick votes. Horii began working for Enix in 1982 after he won a programming contest that they sponsored. He designed two games for them early on before moving on to create Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest in Japan). Dragon Warrior was the very first ever top-down role-playing videogame, thus effectively becoming quite possibly the most important release in RPG videogaming history, as every RPG released since then pretty much is either influenced by that, or influenced by another game that was influenced by that. Whether directly or indirectly, if you've ever enjoyed an RPG, you probably have Horii to thank for it. Anyways, Dragon Warrior was an instant success, becoming wildly popular in Japan and a significant success in America. Today, the series has seen a variety of sequels, as well as a few spinoffs, and is still regarded as one of the best RPG franchises ever. The ninth main installment recently released on the Nintendo DS, and Horii is currently working on the tenth to be released next year on the Nintendo Wii.
21: Alexey Pajitnov
Алексей Пажитнов. The Russian that changed gaming forever. Finished also with 16 points, but in five votes. In 1984, he was working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences when he decided to put together a little puzzle game. Expecting just to be making a little mind exercise, Pajitnov never expected the storm that would ensue. He released Tetris on the Elektronika 60, then it was ported to the IBM PC shortly after. It traveled outside the Soviet Union rather quickly, when it was quickly discovered by the outside world. From here, lots of legal issues and a whole mess took place, but the game quickly became extremely popular. And through all of it, Pajitnov initially had zero rights to the game anyways, given that he created it under Soviet control. Finally, Nintendo got control of the game, releasing it for the NES and the Game Boy in 1989, and it reached worldwide recognition, becoming one of the most popular games of all time. Over the years, dozens of Tetris clones and imitators were released, until in 1996 when Pajitnov finally formed The Tetris Company because he regained rights to the title from Russia. Pajitnov is now involved in all Tetris releases yet again, and he has helped develop a number of other puzzle games, Tetris-related or not. Tetris is now by far the most well-known and best-selling puzzle game of all time, and the grandfather of most "traditional" puzzle games today - so much so that many consider "Tetris-like" to be a subgenre within puzzle games themselves!
20: Tetsuya Nomura
Nomura. Yet another RPG guy. This one finished with seventeen votes, placing him at #20 on our list. Nomura began working with Square in the early '90s as a debugger for Final Fantasy IV. Apparently he made an impression, because he quickly climbed up the development ladder and has now been highly influential in most Final Fantasy titles, main series or spinoff, since then, as well was every Kingdom Hearts title so far. Mainly designing characters, he also directs and produces a number of the titles he works on. Besides the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series, he worked heavily on Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, the Parasite Eve series, and a handfull others. Today, he's working on pretty much everything that SquareEnix has announced, and probably a few titles that they haven't.
19: Gary Gygax
If you're an RPG fan and you don't know Gygax, you're a disgrace to the seventeen points he amassed. Gygax is the father of the role-playing game. Around 1948, at the simple age of ten, he began playing what we now know as "live-action RPGs" with his friends, helping decide the rules and oftentimes playing as referee. Quickly beginning to love wargaming and the realm of fantasy, he would play a variety of board games, then design variants off of them and mold them into new games. He began utilizing different types of dice to further randomize the outcome, sometimes only four-sided dice, sometimes as much as twenty-sided. In 1967, he organized a gaming meet in his basement, now retconned as "Gen Con 0" as the next year, he hosted the first official Lake Geneva Convention. It was through this gaming convention that he met some friends who inspired him to continue developing rules for his games, starting to give stats to each of the pieces of armor and weaponry that the figurines they used were "wielding". From this point, the cogs fell into place one at a time, until in 1972, he created Dungeons and Dragons. From here, the role-playing game became an instant smash-hit - most finding the only downside being that you have to do all the calculations yourself. The game became a multi-million dollar endeavor, earning fandom across the globe. Quickly, the idea of converting the gameplay mechanics to computerized form became popular, and role-playing videogames suddenly became all the rage. Today, the RPG is one of the most important videogame genres ever to exist, with elements spread throughout nearly every other genre to some degree. RPGs number in the thousands, with some of the bestselling game series, like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Pokemon, Deus Ex, Ultima, and hundreds of other series all having Gygax and his Dungeons and Dragons brainchild to thank for their existance.
To be continued.
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