The business minds and decision-makers behind the games
Hiroshi Yamauchi transformed Nintendo from a playing-card manufacturer into the most powerful company in video game history, presiding over the NES, Game Boy, SNES, N64, and the franchises that defined the medium.
Minoru Arakawa founded and ran Nintendo of America from its origins as a struggling arcade distributor into the dominant force in the North American games industry, personally overseeing the NES launch and establishing the company's unmatched retail relationships.
Howard Lincoln served as Nintendo of America's senior vice president and later chairman, acting as the company's legal and legislative strategist through the console wars, the congressional video game violence hearings, and the licensing battles that cemented Nintendo's market dominance.
Tom Kalinske turned Sega of America from a marginal Nintendo competitor into a company that briefly held majority market share in North America, executing the "Genesis does what Nintendon't" campaign and the surprise E3 1995 launch of the Saturn that ultimately backfired.
Masayuki Uemura designed both the Famicom and the Super Famicom, the two consoles that defined home video gaming's first and second generations and together sold over 110 million units worldwide.
Trip Hawkins founded Electronic Arts in 1982 with the radical proposition that game developers deserved public credit and royalties like musicians, creating the first third-party publisher to treat software authors as artists and building it into the world's largest game company.
Nolan Bushnell co-founded Atari in 1972 and created Pong, launching the commercial video game industry — then built Atari into a billion-dollar company before selling it to Warner Communications and eventually departing as it declined.
Jack Tramiel founded Commodore, produced the Commodore 64 — the best-selling personal computer of all time — then acquired and relaunched Atari, shaping the home computer and console market on both sides of the Atlantic through relentless cost-cutting and mass-market pricing.
Bernie Stolar built the PlayStation's North American third-party software portfolio as SCEA's EVP of Third Party Software and Licensing, then moved to Sega of America as president and made the controversial decision to discontinue the Saturn.
Peter Main served as Nintendo of America's Vice President of Marketing through its peak years, overseeing the campaigns that made Nintendo the dominant brand in American toy and entertainment retail from the NES launch through the Nintendo 64 era.
Don Mattrick led Electronic Arts through its most commercially dominant decade as president of worldwide studios, then ran Microsoft's Xbox division and presided over both the Xbox 360's market success and the Xbox One's disastrous launch reveal.
Lincoln Spector was a prominent PC game critic and technology journalist whose reviews and columns in PCWorld, InfoWorld, and other publications shaped how mainstream American audiences evaluated and understood personal computer software through the 1980s and 1990s.
The textile executive who ran Atari at its commercial peak, dismissed his star programmers as "towel designers" — and thereby created Activision, the first third-party developer, and set the industry on the road to the 1983 crash.
The aggressive Sega president who bought the company in 1984, drove it to 60% of the US console market with the Genesis — and then destroyed that lead by abandoning it too early for the Saturn.
The programmer-turned-executive who built Sierra On-Line from a kitchen-table operation into an adventure game empire — and ran it from a small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The "Father of the PlayStation" — an engineer who secretly built a sound chip for Nintendo, was very nearly fired for it, and then built the console that destroyed Nintendo's dominance.
Left Microsoft because Doom convinced him his employer was missing the point of the internet — then built Half-Life, and then built the store that swallowed PC gaming.
Started a jukebox rental and repair business in Osaka in 1969, and turned it into the company that made Castlevania, Contra, Gradius and Metal Gear.