The gaming world has reached the stage where certain designers, publishers, and other professionals can be considered celebrities.  Names like Shigeru Miyamoto, Wil Wright, Cliff Bleszinski, Jordan Mechner, Sid Meier, and Keiji Inafune are well-known in the industry, and are easily recognized by those who follow game development.  Just like the movie or TV industries, though, the gaming world is filled with individuals who have made huge contributions without receiving public notoriety, and we at Gamervision felt it was time that these luminaries got the respect they deserve.  Here are five names in gaming that you didn't know were important.

Dona Bailey - Since the very beginning of the gaming industry, game development has been one of the most male-dominated fields this side of beard modeling.  In fact, there have been very few notable women in the industry at all, with only Ubisoft's Jade Raymond and Nintendo's Cammie Dunaway immediately springing to mind, and both of them are executives.  Ms. Raymond is a former programmer for Sony, but other than her, the list of female devs is shamefully empty.  Perhaps that's why Dona Bailey's contributions are so remarkable.  Alongside her partner, Ed Logg, Dona Bailey created one of the seminal games of the "Golden Age of Arcade Games," in Centipede.  Not only is Centipede the first game to utilize a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence, it was the first arcade game that attracted female gamers in large numbers.  Now a game design teacher at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Dona Bailey wasn't the first female developer (that honor goes to Carol Shaw of Atari, who brought us 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, River Raid, and Super Breakout), but she is arguably the most influential, and someone who should be held up as an example of a female game maker who knew how to appeal to female gamers without pandering to them.

Alexander S. Douglas - When people think about the birth of the video game, one word immediately comes to mind; Pong.  For most, Pong, with its simple, intuitive controls and minimal visual presentation, represents the first real video game, but in reality, Pong was two decades late to the party.  Way back in 1952, Alexander S. Douglas, a professor of computer science at Cambridge, created a presentation for his Ph D. on human/computer interactions.  What he came up with was nothing short of revolutionary.  Douglas, working on a rotary telephone controller, programmed OXO, a game that perfectly emulated Tic-Tac-Toe, and used a 35x16 pixel cathode ray tube.  Essentially, it was the first computer game to utilize a graphical display.  It wasn't much to look at; basically a black and white Tic-Tac-Toe board, but for the first time ever, a game was being played on a computerized display.  The game only existed on the EDSAC, a computer unique to Cambridge, meaning that its popularity was, to say the least, limited, but in a very real way, it is the ancestor of every single video game ever produced.  

Taneli Armanto - I'll give you five guesses as to what game is on more computerized devices than any other, and I'll bet you still don't get it.  Pac Man?  Nope.  Frogger?  Not even close.  Super Mario Bros.?  You're joking, right?  Tetris?  Sorry, not anymore. Believe it or not, the honor goes to a game called Snake.  One of the simplest games around, Snake challenges players to direct their snake-like avatar to eat pellets on a grid without running over the ever-growing tail or running into walls.  It's a lot like the Light Cycles from Tron, except without all the coolness and fun.  While the game's been around in some form or another since 1976, it wasn't until Nokia put Snake on their Nokia 6110 cell phone that it would become the most widely distruibuted video game in the world.  Back in 1997, a Finnish engineer named Taneli Armanto made a version of Snake for the 6110, and ever since, the world's largest producer of cell phones has included a version on every phone they've ever made.  Since Nokia's Snake is the only game Armanto is credited on, it's a bit of a stretch to call him one of the great game makers, but his contributions are undeniable, and his creation can be played pretty much anywhere there are cell phones..which, at this point, is pretty much everywhere.

Allan Alcorn - There's no arguing that Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney deserve their vaunted statuses as the "Fathers of Modern Gaming."  Their efforts with Atari helped shape the industry in an era when no one was quite sure what the gaming market looked like, or if there even was a significant number of people interested in gaming.  As influential as these two were, though, they might be forgotten footnotes in the history of American businessmen if it weren't for Allan Alcorn.  When Allan Alcorn, who despite his name is not a 1960's superheroic alter-ego,  was hired by Atari as an electrical engineer, he had no experience as a game designer or programmer.  Bushnell gave him a project to work on, which was secretly a training program to acclimate him to game design.  The result impressed Atari's top brass so much that they immediately decided to make it the company's first arcade game release, Pong.  Even more influential, however was the way that Alcorn presented his game to Bushnell and Dabney.  The engineer purchased an old black and white TV, then soldered the game's board to the TV, resulting in a crude home console.  Seeing this technology in action, Atari reconsidered their arcade-heavy overall business model, and decided to test the marketability of a home gaming console.  So not only is Allan Alcorn  responsible for Pong, he's also the man who inspired Atari to make home consoles.

Alan Kotok - Not to be confused with Bobby Kotick, (most famous for running Activision and feasting on newborn babies) Alan Kotok was an important part of the team that created Spacewar!, an early vector-based game.  While Kotock was a programmer, he didn't code the game; that was left to the great Steve "Slug" Russell.  He didn't design it, either; Russell, Wayne Witaenem, and Martin Graetz actually came up with the game's simple concept.  So what did Kotok do, and why was it such an important moment?  With help from a friend, Robert A Saunders, Alan Kotok designed the control box for Spacewar!, essentially creating the first video game controller.  It didn't look much like modern controllers, or even old-school joysticks, but it was the first time anyone built a dedicated control unit for an interactive computerized game, and every game pad, flight stick, racing wheel, paddle, and motion controller that's come since owes a debt of gratitude to Alan Kotok.