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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Well, if Bethesda had allowed whoever was the lead on Morrowind to have his name so proeminently figured, we'd have another "cult" on our hands now.

Maybe Kojima deserves credit for knowing how to market himself.

Say, that's the really interesting question. How did he get Konami/Sony to feature his name everywhere?

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I remember Metal Gear Solid having movie-style credits at the beginning and end of the game that feature his name, I wonder if that's the origin?

Metal Gear Solid 5 shows his name constantly. I don't know if anyone's counted but I bet it's over 100 times.

The constant credits in MGS V are a sort of joke / reaction to the disastrous relationship he had with the studio. They threatened to take his name off the box, so he made sure his name was all over the game.

Perhaps because information was leaked that Konami was planning on removing his name entirely from the game; fans revolted, so they put it back - in excess. The excess part is my hypothesis.

IIRC its his way to protest having his name removed from the boxart by Konami.

That's where it started... but how did they allow him to do that?

There are like two well known names in the gaming industry... Hideo Kojima and Sid Meier. How did they do it?

To me it was more prominent in the 90s, with names like John Romero, Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, American McGee, Tim Schafer, and so on. I think that after they failed to deliver in one way or another, their names faded into obscurity from pop culture, and weren't replaced by new ones. There are two possible reasons for this: either consumers realized that these creators were never the geniuses they were propped up to be (I find this unlikely), or the big companies realized that they didn't really like the idea of having these rockstar designers doing whatever they wanted instead of what the shareholders wanted.

The idea of the genius designer is therefore much more prevalent in smaller indie studios, where somebody makes an innovative game basically single-handedly, and then becomes known throughout the community

It has everything to do with the big-businessification of the industry. As soon as people with money realized there was a growing market they dumped tons of money into it. You can't just allow a risk such as having a person put their name on art, since that person might one day give you the finger and do something else. In reality you can't even tolerate the risk of making art. That's the games industry today.

Kojima got away with it because his eccentric egotism meant that he could put his name down hard and fast before that privilege was taken away. And while Konami were trying to take it he made a point to put his name on everything even more so that when they did show him the door he'd have an exit strategy. He's one weird dude but at least his games are art and was the one person to be able to tell a publisher to eat dirt.

Even with indie, it's often the studio that has the reputation more than the individual— thinking like Klei, Supergiant, Drinkbox. Unless you watch GDC talks or Noclip docs, you wouldn't really know who the people are who are involved in those companies.

That said, there are of course exceptions— thinking Jonathan Blow and Edmund McMillen. But even in those cases, their name recognition is probably more about them having been featured in widely-watched documentaries than because their names are front-and-centre in their creations.

Bennett Foddy has a GDC talk with another indie game developer (whose name I've ironically forgotten) about how good of an idea it is to release indie games under your own name. At the scale of an indie game, you're not likely to release another game with the same group of people, but you are likely to work on another game yourself.

In 1987, the company released Sid Meier's Pirates!, which began a trend of placing Meier's name in the titles of his games.[9] He later explained that the inclusion of his name was because of the dramatic departure in the design of Pirates! compared to the company's earlier titles. Stealey decided that it would improve the company's branding, believing that it would make those who purchased the flight simulators more likely to play the game. Stealey recalled: "We were at dinner at a Software Publishers Association meeting, and Robin Williams was there. And he kept us in stitches for two hours. And he turns to me and says 'Bill, you should put Sid's name on a couple of these boxes, and promote him as the star.' And that's how Sid's name got on Pirates, and Civilization."[5][10]

Hard work, intentionality, and most importantly luck.

There are many famous game devs including Shigeru Miyamoto, Todd Howard (I'm not sure if you were joking in your first comment because he definitely used to have a cult following), Peter Molyneux, Gabe Newell, Carmack and Romero, Will Wright.

[quote]There are many famous game devs including Shigeru Miyamoto, Todd Howard (I'm not sure if you were joking in your first comment because he definitely used to have a cult following), Peter Molyneux, Gabe Newell, Carmack and Romero, Will Wright.[/quote]

Well, I consider myself a serious gamer but I have no idea who Todd Howard is... <googles>... oh, Bethesda.

That kinda proves my point because I have bought and played most Bethesda titles. Had absolutely no idea who the lead designer/director was though.

However, I absolutely knew about Kojima from MGS 1 onwards...

You forgot Warren Spector btw :) But there was no "Peter Molyneux's Black and White", or "Will Wright's The Sims". Was there?

I'd argue John Romero is the most influential among those. He is the architect of the grand daddy of 3D game engines.

That would be Carmack. But Carmack and Romero are pretty much the Ryu and Ken, respectively, of 90s PC gaming, so their achievements are almost always considered together.

As for the most influential game designer, Miyamoto by a country mile. His games established or refined the modern vocabulary of the medium.

If we credit all of valve's accomplishments to Gabe I would argue he is up there as well, for the games, but even more for Steam, given the influence it has had on pc gaming, and indie games in particular.

Isn't that more applicable to John Carmack? If I remember it correctly, Romero was the game designer type, while Carmack was clearly the technician at id.

He was the "architect" in a literal sense of the word. Romero was the lead level designer for Doom and contributed prominently to the level design of Quake.

I probably should have left out "engines" from that sentence for it to be the most literally accurate.

One could argue that Quake's tone set the tone for half-life, which was a big advance for narrative storytelling in the medium, which means half-life in turn heavily influence the tone of the medium in future generations. There is a bit of a void in this thread that things run into after ~2010 where things like tone and storytelling are washed away in most games. Romero's influences were games of the time, but also HP Lovecraft. A lot of what is in Quake and Doom feels pretty original and influential. I'd be happy to be corrected though.

What about Miyamoto? or to a lesser extent Suda51? There's also John Carmack/Romero, Gabe Newell - maybe the trick is being associated with a long string of successful and unique games with a common thread between them.

Roberta and Ken Williams were big PC adventure game celebrities, too — and eventually their company, Sierra (at the time owned by Vivendi), published Gabe Newell’s Half-Life.

Don't forget Miyazaki (Dark Souls not Ghibli) or Sakurai.

Shigeru Miyamoto is pretty well known, possibly more than both Kojima and Sid Meier. I mean, look at this gold https://youtu.be/DiUeuc7eOh0

There are way more than 2 well known names in the gaming industry. I think this is just a common thing that happens when technical directors produce high quality cult favourites.

Yeah, but those are the two whose names are literally part of the title of their games. It's not Alpha Centauri, it's Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

I think in the SM case, it eventually became a name-licensing deal kind of like Clancy, where the person attached to the name didn't actually have anything to do with the games. But still, it's a significant difference from other gaming celebrities where it's only really those following the industry who are aware of them.

As I understand it, Meier is still pretty involved with any game that has his name on it even though he hasn't been the lead developer on them for years. Seems as though he keeps an eye on the whole "but is it fun?" thing.

Kojima is the only game designer who has been referred to as "God" in a Thomas Pynchon novel, so he wins.

There's more than two. I'd throw in Todd Howard and John Carmack. Usually it's done like becoming notable in any other field: innovation.

Ken Rolston is the name you're seeking!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMCEssAfhWI

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