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50 Games Industry Figures To Watch?
Thanks to 1UP for their feature discussing important videogame developers to watch out for, as they list "...fifty people in the game industry - some you've likely heard of, many you've not - who we think will help define gaming the most in the next twelve months." As well as the John Carmacks and Warren Spectors of this world, notably overlooked figures on the list include Julian Eggebrecht of Factor 5 ("Eggebrecht's team is one of the few out there that actually try to tax the GameCube to its limits") and Yasumi Matsuno of Square Enix ("..the director of Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics... [now] directing Final Fantasy XII.")
Miyamoto isn't even on the list.
We're supposed to believe that the guy behind the dead-on-arrival N-Gage is more important than Miyamoto? Please.
If this was written a few years ago, I could see including the Stamper Brothers of Rare. Bur first off, Rare's quality has greatly gone down hill over the past few years. More importantly, they want to get out of the business soon. That's why they sold all their stock of the company to Microsoft a year ago.
And how can you include all the big people at Nintendo except for Miyamoto?
Speaking of designers... anyone know what happened to Lori and Cori Cole from Sierra? They made some great games, but the Yosemite division got shut down a few years ago.
51: Valve's IT Security Guy
Watch him get booted out of every job in the future!
Watch him use MS Outlook without patching!
Watch him lose his company millions for leaving ports open!
Watch him get grilled into little chunks by the HL2 community!
Well, for the most part engines aren't very interesting.
For the PC, most people just licence either the latest engine from Carmack (who was mentioned), or the latest from Epic. The HL2 engine will probably make it into that list too when it finally comes out.
For the PS2, most companies just make an engine and stick with it as much as possible. Look at Capcom's games - most of them are based off the Resident Evil core.
On the Xbox and GC, who knows? No one ever really talks about it.
Really, people only really care about the engine if it's more important than the game itself. Quake 3 was on ok game, but it's engine was the important thing. It made a lot of money for id, and was used for a lot of good games. Doom 3 probably won't be a bad game, but it'll probably be remembered far more for its graphics than its gameplay. Think about it... we don't really know much about the game other than that it looks really good.