Video Game Designers
All game enthusiasts have an iconic gaming moment they cannot forget. The moment you got your first Mushroom in Super Mario, or the first time you jump through a portal in Portal game or your first raid in World of Warcraft. Such memories shape our gaming perspective.
For most players, these memories are just fun stories. But some people take these memories and use them to get into the world of video game design. People interested in game design often wonder how they can do the same thing.
Of course, numerous well-known names in the video game business have stories about how they got into video game designing. Let’s have a look at some of them;
– Gabe Newell –
Today, Gabe Newell is best known by his ownership for Valve Software, the parent company of Steam video game market platform. He is also the creator of the classic video game Half-Life. However, before he got into the video game business, Newell worked for Microsoft for about 13 years.
Although Newell was always interested in game design, it was only after one of the other employees left Microsoft to join the video game company ID Software in order to work on the game Quake at the moment, Newell started to consider investing in the video game business. Without a long time passed, Newell has founded Valve Corporation.
With his partner Mike Harrington, Newell got into game design and developed Half-Life and it became a huge success. The money they made thanks to Half-Life the company grew quickly. They released the Steam platform in 2003 and it became one of the most leading powers in the video game business.
– Kim Swift –
Kim Swift is one of the best inspirations for game design students.
In 2005, while Swift was still a game design student in DigiPen Institute of Technology, she and a group of other DigiPen students that as much into video games as Swift, together made a game named “Narbacular Drop”. In the game, the player was controlling a princess named “No-knees” who cannot jump but can create portals on certain surfaces.
Kim Swift and her team later had a chance to show their game to Gabe Newell, founder of the video game company Valve. Newell loved the concept and immediately offered the whole team a job in Valve. They accepted the offer.
During the time they work in Valve, Swift and her team evolved their game into the Portal game we know today. As most of you know, Portal was a huge success for Valve. It wrote its name into video game history by being such a well-designed game and influenced the whole puzzle game genre. After working on few more titles under the Valve name, Swift moved on to the indie game design company Airtight Games and continue to making puzzles games.
Kim Swift is one of the best examples for young people who want to be a game designer. She started as a game design student, worked with a business giant like Gabe Newell, and grew forward to making her own titles.
– Shigeru Miyamoto –
Shigeru Miyamoto is a legendary name in video game design business. Even if you didn’t know his name until this point, you will hear it a lot from now on if you are interested in game design.
In 1975, Miyamoto graduated from his school but he didn’t know what he should do for a living. When he found a job where he paints arcade cabinets he happened to be working for a video game company, Nintendo.
A while later, one of Nintendo’s arcade games “Radar Scope” failed in the market. When the company asked employees to suggest new game ideas to turn the unsold arcade units into new games, Miyamoto came up with the video game design of the first “Donkey Kong” game. The company used his game design and Donkey Kong reached a huge success.
Starting from that moment Miyamoto became a video game designer at Nintendo and worked on many titles. He created many legendary titles for Nintendo platforms such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.
Miyamoto continued to be an inspiring figure for all future game designers and game design students. He affected the whole video game world with the games he designed and he is the name that makes Nintendo the company it is today.
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