The Colbert Show's gonna be really fun now.

can someone please tell me what Angelina Jolie has done this year?

she took....er adopted a new baby

Angelina Jolie helps people realise Miyamoto's importance. Without Miyamoto there would be no SNES or Playstation, without Playstation there would probably be no Tomb Raider and without Tomb Raider Jolie wouldn't have gained enough publicity for gaining publicity through adoptions in media.

Uh, you left out Ralph Baer. The first console was his creation. Bushnell was on the arcade side. Bushnell's business savvy put the money in the videogame biz but Ralph Baer was the visionary to figure out how to put electronic games on a common television screen and define the entire console experience in the first place.

Videogames used to have 3 different classifications before the terms were merged into 'videogames' as a catch-all term.

Computer games, Arcade games, Video games.

Computer games were the first and the origin to put games in digital display form came from a host of sources.

"The first known concept for an electronic game was a device called the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device patented in the United States by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1948.^[1] The proposed device would have used eight vacuum tubes to simulate a missile firing at a target and would use knobs to adjust the curve and speed of the missile. The earliest programs created to run a game on a computer appear to be a checkers program created by Christopher Strachey in 1951 on the Pilot ACE and Manchester Mark I and a tic-tac-toe program called OXO created by A.S. Douglas in 1952 on the EDSAC computer to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. Also in 1951, at the Festival of Britain the NIMROD computer, designed to play the game Nim, made its public bow. Perhaps the first true electronic game not a representation of a pen-and-paper or board game was created in 1958 on an oscilloscope by William Higinbotham and named Tennis for Two. Designed to entertain visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory at its annual visitors day, the game displayed a tennis court in side view and required controllers with a knob and a button. In this simple tennis game, the first player chooses an angle and serves the ball after which the second player must choose an angle and attempt to return the ball over the net. While popular at the visitor day, Higinbotham never attempted to patent or market the device, which was taken apart in 1959. Whether one of the concepts above, or another one entirely, counts as the first video game, none of them received wide distribution or had an impact on the industry...

...While the video game industry did not become firmly established until 1972, the three major facets of the market, computer games, home console games, and arcade games were all in place by the beginning of the 1970s. The landmark game that eventually led to the launch of both the college mainframe tradition and the video arcade game was conceived at MIT in 1961 by a group of friends including Steve Russell, Wayne Witanen, and J. Martin Graetz, members of an organization called the Tech Model Railroad Club, interested in science fiction novels and movies. When MIT replaced its aging TX-0 mainframe computer with a DEC PDP-1, which had a built-in monitor, Russell, Witanen, and Graetz wanted to create a program that would test and tax the new computer's capabilities and drew on their love of science fiction in deciding to make a game involving spaceships. Russell was primarily responsible for the design of the game, which was finished in 1962. Called Spacewar!, the final product featured two ships dubbed the "Wedge" and the "Needle" for their shapes that two players controlled and moved around the screen while firing torpedoes at each other until one ship was destroyed. The game became more complex as Russell's friends continued to modify it, the most important additions being accurate gravity effects centered around a sun and a hyperspace function that would teleport the ship to a random part of the screen. DEC decided to distribute Spacewar! as a demo program with each PDP computer it sold, exposing university students across the country to the game. After Spacewar!, there was little advancement in computer games for the rest of the 1960s. While it is likely that other innovative games were created during this time period, no reliable method existed to distribute them across the country, as there was little standardization across computers and no good way to port games from one system to another. Spacewar! itself would likely not have become a national phenomenon (in university computer labs at least) if not for DEC’s decision to bundle the game with its computers. In the end, these games disappeared into oblivion as old machines broke down and old tape was erased."

Arcade videogames branched out from the mechanical pinball, pool hall, circus, bar & saloon type of amusement that has been around as a business since the late 1800's. Gotta love the industrial revolution (I bet they thought they were living 'in the future' back then). Nolan Bushnell drew from this to take the coin-op and put it into a digital display form with the knack for business put the money behind the arcade electronic game industry with Atari.

HOWEVER that 3rd pillar, Games on a TV screen Tele-VISION ~> VIDEO, came from Ralph Baer's invention. Unlike computer games which were exclusive to some MIT nerds, hackers and such VIDEOgames were intended to be used for ALL much like arcade games. The Magnavox Odyssey, the end result of Baer's longtime hustle to get someone to get behind his idea (1968 ~> 1972), started the whole electronic game industry.

"In May of 1972, Nolan had seen a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey, which included a tennis game. He decided to have Alan produce an arcade version of the Odyssey's Tennis game,^[7] which would go on to be named PONG."

No Ralph Baer, no Nolan Bushnell.

No Ralph Baer, no electronic gaming industry period, DEFINITELY no Nolan Bushnell.

The first videogame console in Japan was the Magnavox Odyssey......distributed by Nintendo. 1975.

No Ralph Baer, no Odyssey, no Nintendo.

No Ralph Baer, no videogame industry, no Nintendo to distribute, no Nintendo to go it on their own for Japan, no industry savior, no videogame industry today. 

Though Nolan Bushnell's Atari would eventually overtake the Odyssey and become the monster that brought most people to the game it was Ralph Baer and his Magnavox Odyssey that put electronic gaming as a business together in the first place.

"Now we know!"

"And knowing is half the battle"

John Lucas

Yeah, but the description of him in the voting page lists his influence in game design because of Mario, Donkey Kong and Legend of Zelda. You can't ignore the effect of Miyamoto's oldest game series today, as the Twilight Princess shows. Hardcore gaming was the main driver of Nintendo until Wii and without the great games Wii would not have seen daylight. Kutaragi was similarily on the list in 2004, although he had been progressing the gaming industry for years.

EDIT: what amazes me is that US citizens pick people like Spangler who have zero influence outside America. I've even heard that most Americans think Irak and Vietnam, the 'foreign' places, are in USA. Another thing I've heard is that there's only US history in history classes and US geography in geography classes. Must be one of the reasons why Americans think Bush is rightly the self-proclaimed world police.

Number 2 already... like Mario would say: letsa getta goin!

 Oh I'm not ignoring his influence or contributions in the past at all. He's easily the most well known game designer of all time. But the Wii is definately the reason he's on there this time.

Also, I'm Canadian, and I'd never even heard Spangler, Perez Hilton. This list leads me to worry about the whole concept of democracy.