DAY SIX
Today, we crack the TOP TEN.
10: Sid Meier
Sid Meier enters our Top Ten today with 54 total points, spread across ten votes. Meier is perhaps one of the most well-known videogame developers... but could that possibly be due to his tacking of his name onto the title of many of his games? Who knows. Either way, Meier began developing games in the early 1980s when he began Microprose with Bill Stealey. He started with a variety of flight simulators - Spitfire Ace, F-15 Strike Eagle, NATO Commander, and more. He continued developing a variety of games, releasing his famed Pirates! in 1987, Railroad Simulator in 1990, and his most well-known game, Civilization, in 1991. He continued producing game after game, until in 1996, MicroProse had been taken over by another game company, and he left to form Firaxis Games. He later regained control of all his most popular franchises through Firaxis, continuing to develop them over the years. Meier is now responsible for the development of over four-hundred videogames, most being incredibly influential in the progress of the PC gaming scene, and it is unknown what he is currently working on.
9: Hironobu Sakaguchi
Mr. Sakaguchi completed this with 54 points as well, his through a quick seven votes. Sakaguchi began working for Square in the early 1980s, originally part-time but he shortly became a full-timer in charge of Planning and Development. Through Square, he helped develop a variety of titles throughout the early and mid 1980s, but they continued to prove unsuccessful. Square's future became dim. Sakaguchi began working on one final project, a fantasy RPG. He decided to give it a somewhat ironic name given these circumstances, naming it Final Fantasy. He approached Nobuo Uematsu to compose music for his game, and it was released in 1987. The game became a runaway hit, the sole reason Square survived as a company. Under Sakaguchi's supervision, he guided Final Fantasy into a successful franchise with dozens upon dozens of releases. Additionally, the series has seen a wide number of spinoff franchises, including the SaGa series, Crystal Chronicles, Seiken Densetsu (the Mana series), and Kingdom Hearts. In 2004, after overseeing the creation of nearly two-dozen Final Fantasy titles and a variety of others, including hits such as Chrono Trigger, Parasite Eve, Xenogears, and Super Mario RPG, Sakaguchi resigned from Square and began operations at a new studio of his own, Mistwalker. At Mistwalker, he helped with the production of new RPG games, namely Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey. Today, Sakaguchi is at work on a new secret project that he claims is huge, saying he's "betting a lot on this project". No other details have yet surfaced.
8: Satoru Iwata
Iwata, presently the President of Nintendo, finished with 58 points in a total of twelve votes. Iwata began working in videogames nearly thirty years ago, through Nintendo's subsidiary HAL Laboratory. Iwata helped develop all of HAL's famed titles, including the Kirby series, Earthbound, and more. He was eventually promoted to the president of HAL Labs, which he continued to work for the next seven years. He then took a position working at Nintendo in 2000, as part of their Corporate Planning division. He continued working in that position for an additional two years, until Hiroshi Yamauchi retired from his position as Nintendo's president and named Iwata as his successor. Nintendo had been struggling with complacency in the gaming industry for some time now, incapable of moving forward or becoming more financially successful. They were slowly becoming "the last big thing", just as they had forty years prior. Iwata saw this and determined that the company needed to stop just doing improvements on the same old formula. He decided they needed to do something new. Two years later, the Nintendo DS was released, entirely changing how people originally knew handheld gaming. Another two years after that, Iwata led Nintendo to release the Wii, now known today as the fastest-selling game console to date, with the DS coming in a close second. Besides working to have Nintendo do what hasn't been done before, Iwata has also helped work on some of the company's most successful franchises, including The Legend of Zelda, Mario, and Animal Crossing. Presently, Nintendo has become one of the most profitable companies in worldwide history through Iwata's guide, its average profit per employee being over one million dollars. He is now working to guide Nintendo into the next age, undoubtedly deciding what is to succeed the DS and the Wii and when.
7: John Carmack
Carmack finishes off today's updates with fourteen votes amassing to 62 points. One of the most well-known and successful developers of all time, Carmack began work in the late 1980s, when he developed a new side-scrolling game engine that had never been done before on the PC. It worked so well, he and a friend spent the entire next night creating a near-perfect port of the original level of Super Mario Bros. 3 to the PC. They eventually ported the entire game, then tried licensing it to Nintendo. Nintendo turned them down, however, saying they had zero plans to expand into the PC market, so they began work on a new sidescrolling series utilizing the same engine. This series was called Commander Keen, which they created three titles for. These games became a hit, so Carmack and friends left their employer and founded iD Software, then creating the next three Commander Keen titles and effectively developing a legend. They did a few other games, before creating Wolfenstein 3D, the first major first-person shooter in videogame history. Wolfenstein was pseudo-3D, though, and it wouldn't be until iD's next major hit, Doom, that they would release a truly 3D title (albeit still using sprites, though). Wolfenstein was a hit, but Doom became a legend. iD became the most important company in the PC gaming market, releasing hit after hit after hit. In 1996, they released Quake, which was finally their first genuinely 100% three-dimensional title utilizing 3D models instead of just sprites. Each of iD's releases continued to be massive hits, and today, iD continues to pioneer the FPS genre, though perhaps not at the level of distinction they enjoyed in the 1990s.
╔╦╦╗╔╦╗
SW-
