Fathers of the U.S. Gaming Industry 2004

Written by Matt Swider on July 04, 2004

Fathers of the U.S. Gaming Industry 2004: Who's your daddy!

Just before heading out to join in the Fourth of July celebrations with the rest of the world, the members of Gaming Target update with a special feature relating to the holiday. In keeping with tradition, we bring you our fourth-annual Fathers of the U.S. Gaming Industry feature commemorating the Fathers that have shaped, and still mold the face of the gaming industry in the United States. Today, we once again treat you to the feature with additional new people profiles and updated information on the ones from last year. Check out the several profiles of many of the industry leaders who have worked to bring, and continue the experience of gaming entertainment in America.
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Bernie Stolar
I think this once President and COO of Sega of America and Executive Vice President of SCEA, doesn't receive the respect he really deserves. The man is a genius in the field of launching a gaming console. He was one of the masterminds behind the most successful systems in history, the PlayStation. So how did Sony repay him for is hard work? They fired him right before the consoles launch. Stolar went on to become the driving force behind, in my opinion, one of the best console ever conceived, the Sega Dreamcast. Bernie was the one man who pushed for each system to include a 56k modem out of the box, so everyone who bought a Dreamcast was forced to have access to the Internet, without having to purchase an extra piece of hardware. Once again, Bernie was fired right before the system launched. You'd think they'd at least let him enjoy his accomplishments and success. Since then, he has worked with Mattel Interactive, BAM! Entertainment, and is currently involved with the Ultimate Gamers Expo taking place in LA next month.

Claude Comair
Though currently running the first-party studio within Nintendo of America, Nintendo Software Technology Corporation (NSTC), Comair also founded and became president of Digipen School of Technology. This college was setup in 1988 to educate students on creating games and many graduates still go onto working for such Nintendo development studios and NSTC. With two schools setup, one in Seattle and another in British Columbia, Comair has aided the learning process, ensuring quality games from the school's alumni. You can check out many of the projects that come out of Digipen now featured in Nintendo's Nintendo Power magazine each month.

David Crane
One might suspect for him for another Crane brother from the show Fraiser, but David is actually co-founded Activision in 1979 after programming for Atari. He created many of the early titles that instantly became classics, such as Pitfall, Ghostbusters, and A Boy and His Blob during his days at Activision. Crane then left and became co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Skyworks Technologies. On March 6, 2003, he received the First Penguin Award from the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) along with fellow Skyworks VP, Alan Miller.

Dan Kramer
Kramer designed the Trak-ball Controller while working with Atari within his first year at the company. Though his work would help mold the facing of gaming controllers in the future, Atari went under in 1984. Thus, Kramer went his own way to later becoming part of Nyko where you contributed designs of the Worm Light, which is the dominant light accessory for Game Boy systems. In addition, Dan has also been doing consulting for Nuby as well.

David Perry
David Perry has worked himself up through the ranks to be one of the most revered and hardworking men in the video game industry. Early in his career Perry met great success in England developing games such as Smash TV and Savage. He then decided to test out his skills in the US with Virgin software. Here he developed such games on the Sega Genesis such as Cool Spot, Aladdin, and Global Gladiators. After the great success of these games, especially Aladdin, Perry set off to create his own studio, Shiny Entertainment. Shiny established its creative and innovative nature with its first game, Earthworm Jim. Earthworm Jim became an overnight success and placed Shiny on the map as one of the premier developers of the future.

Following the success of Earthworm Jim and its sequel, Perry ventured off to see if he could tackle the PC industry with a very unique game known as MDK. MDK was praised by reviewers and gamers alike and quickly became one of the most successful PC games ever. MDK proved that games could not only be innovative, but fun as well. Shiny produced a few more console games, of which the most popular was Wild 9 on the PSX. Shiny went on to produce such innovative games as Messiah and the incredibly successful and award-winning Sacrifice both on the PC. His most recent success at Shiny is Enter the Matrix, which has become the fastest selling game ever with 2.5 million sales in a littleаover a month. And yes, those numbers are real.

Greg Thomas
The one thing I can say about Greg Thomas is the man knows his sports. As President of Visual Concepts, his company is responsible for rejuvenating the once mighty Sega Sports brand name by themselves. It's even gotten to the point where Sega Sports titles are as of the same caliber as EA's sports franchises, if not higher in some respects. This all happened in a matter of three years folks, which is an astounding accomplishment if you think about it. He will go down in history as the man who launched a whole new generation of Sega Sports titles, especially since Sega has gone multi-platform with its games, reaching a broader audience that will experience Visuals Concepts masterpieces. Be sure to look for ESPN Football to kick off the 2003-2004 season this August.

Howard Lincoln
While working for a law firm, which defended the Nintendo case that threatened the company with copyright infringements the King Kong properties, Howard Lincoln was hired as senior VP of Nintendo of America. Along with Minoru Arakawa, he helped introduce and support Nintendo consoles to the United States, from the original NES down to line. Though still a bit active in the gaming industry, you won't be seeing his name as often anymore, as Mr. Lincoln has been retired since February of 2000, moving onto a position at the Seattle Mariners, a baseball team owned by Nintendo.

John Carmack
What would gaming be without this guy? Carmack is the man responsible for all the parents' complaints that games are too violent. In May of 1992 he released a little game known as Wolfenstein 3D and introduced us to the world of the first-person shooter. This game captivated audiences who demanded more. December 1993, Carmack and his team at id software released a game that has revolutionized the world of gaming, that game was Doom. Doom immersed the gamer in a world of fear and violence that was never before witnessed in a game and once again the public couldn't get enough. The sequel was released the following year and parents started to take notice of the obsessive amounts of gore placed in these games.

By now Carmack had already established himself as a force in the gaming world when he released Quake in 1997. Quake introduced full 3D immersion into the world of gaming and gave the player a full range of motion to admire and examine the world brought to him on his desktop. In December of 1997 Quake 2 was released and it had turned into the gamers playground. It introduced incredible graphics and easily allowed the gamers to alter the game world to their desire. People soon started developing there own Mods for Quake 2 and many other developers began to lease use of this engine for their own games they were going to develop. After 2 years of watching a community blossom around Quake 2 and its wildly popular multiplayer capabilities, Carmack released Quake 3 in late 1999 as a multiplayer only game and the community surrounding the quake series has grow tremendously large. Carmack oversaw the development of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which released for the PC just last year, making sure it adhered to the original concept introduced nine years prior. Currently, Carmack is working on the hugely popular and amazing DOOM III, which should be ready for next year.

John Romero
Romero quickly made his popularity while working at id software with John Carmack. While Carmack was mainly the head of id software Romero gained incredible popularity as one of the head designers for Wolfenstein as well as each of the Doom games. Later his popularity continued to increase through his work as the head designer of the tremendously successful Quake. After Quake was finally finished Romero made a major career decision to leave the lucrative id software to head his own development studio know as Ion Storm. He gathered a team together to create the game of his dreams, Daikatana. Being hyped as a title that would not only revolutionize the first-person shooter genre but gaming in general, and having been delayed for close 3 year (the guys were too busy staring at Romero's wife, Stevie УKillcreekФ Case, who was on hand as a Daikatana level designer), Daikatana was finally released during May of 2000. Failing to live up to the hype, it looks like Romero's dream game wasn't too far off from a nightmare. He continues to head the lavish and outspoken Ion Storm Dallas, so and lets just hope that his next piece of work is an improvement over Daikatana.

Julian Eggebrecht
Julian Eggebrecht and 4 programmers, artists, or musicians founded development studio Factor 5 in Germany in 1987 and moved to the United States in 1996. The firm is providing the Nintendo GameCube with its MusyX Audio Tools, the primary sound software of the console platform, and is in collaboration with LucasArts Entertainment. In addition, the development team's ambitious Star Wars: Rogue Squadron set standards in the Nintendo 64 market and Factor 5's recent release of Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II, the company is not about to break that trend. Additionally, a third-person shooter entitled Thornado is in the works. Indeed, Factor 5's diversity is a welcome addition to the Nintendo GameCube's roster. Through compacting audio tools and technology, Mr. Eggebrecht and Factor 5 have presented the gaming industry with something of a hearing aid.

Ken Kutaragi
Ken Kutaragi is currently the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America. Mr. Kutaragi got his feet wet in the console industry while working with Nintendo on the never released CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. After Nintendo's witnessing the failure of Sega CD, the Sony/Nintendo deal dissolved. Thus, he became a driving force behind Sony entering the console market on its own. With the success of the PlayStation, Mr. Kutaragi took the helm of SCEA as CEO and helped to bring about the release of the PlayStation 2. Without his efforts, Sony may not have entered the console gaming market at all and become a giant threat to Nintendo and now Microsoft. As revealed to us at E3 2003, he hopes to do the same to Nintendo by staking a claim in the handheld market with PSP in 2004.

Ken Lobb
Though some may not know much about Ken Lobb, everyone's surely heard his name down the line before. The СKlobb,' a gun from Rare's GoldenEye 007 N64 title, was named after Ken who worked on the game along with its UK developer. In addition to GoldenEye and its follow-up, Perfect Dark, previous work such as Killer Instinct Gold and Tetrisphere are credited to him. While we were all looking to Ken Lobb's future efforts being demonstrated on GameCube, it seems like the master has left Rare to travel to the X-side. At Microsoft, he remains the Director or Content Planning in picking some of the best third party games to support.

Minoru Arakawa
Minoru Arakawa is the President and founder of Nintendo of America. As the president of NOA, Mr. Arakawa has been responsible for introducing the NES, SNES, N64, and Game Boy family of consoles to the American public. His keen business sense helped to revitalize the American console market with the Nintendo Entertainment System in the mid and late 1980's and has helped Nintendo to remain a constant player in the U.S. videogame industry. In addition to calling the shots at NOA, he has also worked as a producer on several Nintendo software titles, including 1994's Super Punch-Out for the SNES. After working with Nintendo for the last 22 years, Mr. Arakawa retired from the gaming scene in January, but did not reveal any what future endeavors for his new found time. While we will miss his presence, we look forward to the continued efforts of his successor, Tatsumi Kimishima.

Neil Voss
At the tender age 12, Neil Voss began experimenting with electronic music on his Commadore-64 and this hobby soon became a big part of his life. He later became an underground electronic music developer, but saw his fellow composers signing to game developers and made the obvious choice to follow them by joining H20, a third party developer for Atari's Jaguar. His first project was Phear but after Jaguar tanked, H20 signed to Nintendo and began to expand on Phear turning it into Tetrisphear. At his new position as Audio Director, Voss produced, composed and engineered the whole soundtrack for Tetrisphear, which most say made the game a hit. When Voss went on to create more hit techno music for H20 in the N64 puzzler The Next Tetris, the soundtrack became an instant favorite here at Gaming Target. Hats off to Neil Voss, yet another video game pioneer.

Nolan Bushnell
This man created the greatness that which us Americans call Pong; does anything else need to be said? Well I am going to let you know a little more anyway. After Pong he became the founder of a game system you might remember, Atari. He ended up selling the Atari gaming company to Time Warner in 1977 for 28 million dollars. Nolan also went on to create a Pizza chain kids all around the United States love, Chuck E. Cheese. After all of this, many people consider Nolan Bushnell the Godfather of Gaming.

Peter Main
One of the most popular names in the news of Nintendo has been our Canadian friend, VP of sales and marketing, Peter Main. After creating ideas for products like Colgate-Palmolive, Main took a position at Nintendo in 1987 creating promotion buzz to sell Nintendo systems from NES to GameCube. He stayed with the company until retiring 15 years later, following a successful launch of the GameCube in North America.

Peter Moore
Peter Moore took over as Sega of Americas President and COO at a very unstable time. After the firing of Bernie Stolar, and the critical launch of Sega's Dreamcast after the companies Sega Saturn failure, most thought that anyone who took over this position would either have a death wish or simply be crazy. Well sometimes you have to be crazy to be a success, and Peter Moore was crazy enough to take up the challenge. Taking up the job just before the launch of the Dreamcast was a risky maneuver, but in time it proved to be the right one. Moore's success did not stop there as Segas's innovative ideas began to take flight well before that of Sony and Nintendo's. Ideas such as SegaNet, the first console dedicated network for console games, allowed Dreamcast owners too play games like Phantasy Star, and NFL 2K1 head to head with other Dreamcast owners. In January of 2003, Moore left Sega to become a Corporate VP at Microsoft where he oversees retail business in the Home and Entertainment division.

Ralph Baer
For all you gamers out there who are looking for the man to thank for all your hours of gaming entertainment, this is your man. Ralph Baer is commonly referred to as the УFather of VideogamesФ, and for good reason. His accomplishments include creating the first 2-player game, the first use of a light gun, as well as designing and producing the first ever gaming console (The Magnavox Odyssey, 1971) and creating the first coin operated machine, Pong. And these are just a few of his remarkable achievements; father of gaming indeed.

Tom Kalinske
A lot of new gamers these today may not recognize this man. He was Sega of America's President during the 16-bit era back in the early 90's. Tom Kalinske was the man responsible for Sega's strong stand against Nintendo, you know, back when the Sega Genesis was holding its own against the more powerful Super Nintendo system. With some clever advertising and some amazing titles, Sega made their name known in the 16-bit wars, and Kalinske was the mastermind behind it all.

Warren Davis
Davis was a game developer for Gottlieb where he made the world famous Q*Bert and the not so famous title, Us vs. Them. Q*Bert was a constant moneymaker from 1983 to 1984. While Us vs. Them was considered a good game, it didn't reach the same level that Q*Bert did. When Davis left Gottlieb, he went to Midway and made his most successful game Joust 2. Davis also helped the industry in other ways, by starting the game development tools, which eventually became NARC. Davis later went on to make Terminator 2 gun game for the arcade, which became a highly renowned game.

Warren Spector
Warren Spector has been a god in the PC industry for as long as I can remember. Spector brought upon changes in the RPG genre through his work on the Ultima and Ultima Underworld series' that not only revolutionized the RPG genre, but PC gaming in general. After his work on the Ultima series as well as Ultima Underworld, Spector set out to try and merge the RPG genre and the FPS genre and he did so with great success. System Shock, while didn't get rewarded by much commercial success, was praised for the way it was able to immerse the player in a world full of mystery and excitement. He also created such popular games as Serpents Isle and Wings of Glory before moving on to assist in one of the most innovative games of the last 5 years in Thief.

Thief was another game that was able to draw the gamer and make them feel that they were part of the world, but unlike many other FPS Thief emphasized the use of stealth rather then firepower. Warren then moved on to head his own development studio known as Ion Storm Austin and they produced which was hands down the best PC game last year, Deus Ex. Through the use of a great story and the mixing of a few genres, Spector was once again able to draw the player into the game and make him feel like he was there. The player was able to interact with almost every object in the game, each mission was bale to be completed the way the player wanted and the use of multiple endings helped make this one of the most open ended games in a long time. Now Spector has his eyes set of bringing even more immersion into his next couple games, Deus Ex 2: Invisible War and Thief III. his next couple of games, Deus Ex 2: Invisible War and Thief III.