Game Design Celebrities

Via Raph, Patrick Dugan has a good post on game design celebrities on his blog. I wrote a relatively long comment because it got me thinking, and any time I spend more than 30 seconds writing a comment, I hereby authorize myself to repost that comment on my own blog. Read on for my comments after you read the original post.

These days I wonder how likely we’ll be to see major game designer celebrities who are known outside the gaming world like Sid Meier or Will Wright.

It was easier to be a game design auteur back when it didn’t take so many people to make a commercially successful game. Now it would really be wrong to give one designer credit for most games.

There are games like fl0w that are quite well-known in the gaming arena, but despite my knowledge of the game (and having played it for a number of hours), even I have no idea who made it. Nowadays, those smaller games that get extremely popular and can have an auteur become extremely popular without necessarily being associated with their creator.

Are the game development celebrities of now (or tomorrow) going to become popular through blogs, forums, etc. rather than by being associated with a particular game? The Raph Kosters and Lum the Mads (Scott Jennings) of the world, for example.

Four of the five big name game designers Dugan listed became well known a number of years ago: Miyamoto, Wright, Molynuex, Blizinski, McGee. I’ve never heard of Blizinski, and I’m pretty tapped into game development being both a developer and blogger myself. Of those five, my fiancee might be able to point three of them out as game developers…

Point being, designer celebs that are known to people outside our industry have been famous since the times that there were commercially successful game auteurs, so maybe that’s proof that game design celebrities are no longer created by being associated with a specific game.