Top 10 PC Game Developers

Posted by Mark Goninon on




One thing I've always wondered was if there was a way I could go through my list of PC games I've played and objectively rank the developers of these games based on how many of their games I've played and how good they were. Obviously, there's always some subjectivity inherent in judging how good a game is but it was an interesting exercise nonetheless to see if who I generally think are great developers matched the methodology I employed to rank them.

So basically, what I did was got my list of games I've played over the years and then determined who the main designer/developer/producer/writer was behind the game. Already there is some potential for inaccuracies here not to mention it's difficult to gather the credits for some games. Valve games for example are notorious in just lumping everyone's name together in the same group so you never truly know who is the main creative mind behind the game.

Anyway, on I went assigning developers to the games. Once I had done that, I went through each game and gave it a ranking from 0-3 with the following meanings:

0 = A game I played. Didn't think much of it.
1 = A worthwhile and good game.
2 = A game that redefined a genre – or one that revitalised it (e.g. what Diablo did for hack 'n' slash actions RPGs)
3 = A totally new concept or revolutionary game. Ones that start a genre.

After that I did a count of the score assigned to each of more than 250 developers then ranked it in descending order. I then picked the top 10 from this list although this was tricky for the last few since 6 developers (or developer teams) had the same rating. I then used personal preference to pick the remaining four, so I can tell you now that unfortunately John Romero and Tim Willits (both iD Software veterans) didn't make the cut.

Over the next few days I shall be posting a countdown of my Top 10 PC Game developers as a result of the analysis and will be revealing them one by one on this post. I will reveal the developers that make it in at #10 in my next post and these guys should be no stranger to sci-fi fans playing games in the 80s and 90s.

  1. Will Wright
  2. Sid Meier
  3. Chris Roberts
  4. Ron Gilbert
  5. Tom Hall
  6. Brett Sperry
  7. Chris Avellone
  8. Peter Molyneux
  9. Corey and Lori Ann Cole
  10. Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe

So who are your favourite PC game developers and why?

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