Today One (aka Tarn Adams) who is making Dwarf Fortress and formerly worked on Liberal Crime Squad is way up there.

Redigit (of Super Mario Brothers X and Terraria) is another from the current era.

But if we can go oldschool, Sid Meier is a legend. Civilization and Pirates! are two absolute favorites, especially the remake of Pirates and Civs 2 & 4.

But the real OG, the man who showed me I wanted to make videogames, is Tim Sweeney. Sure, now he’s rich and famous, but back in the day, even before UnReal, he ran Epic Megagames out of his parents’ basement and sold floppies by mail. His first game, ZZT, came with the tools included to not just edit levels, but to make a whole new game of your own using the ZZT engine. By the time I discovered it there were already hundreds of user-made games being traded on BBS.

I fell in love. I joined the IRC channels and bulletin boards, I made the games I wanted, I shared them with my friends and over the Internet. It sparked a love in me that still burns today. Sweeney moved on, I moved on, but I will always owe him my regard for releasing ZZT into the world. It changed my life.