Angad Singh Video game icons October 29, 2009

Contents
Introduction.......................................................................................................................................2
Ralph Baer.........................................................................................................................................2
Hideo Kojima.....................................................................................................................................6
Ron Gilbert........................................................................................................................................9
Toru Iwatani.....................................................................................................................................14

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Introduction

Over the years these men have come ahead and beat the odds, and shown us yet
another way to look at the potential of the ever changing video game industry.
The contributions of these men showed us how to believe in the spirit of video
gaming and introduced to the world, the art of having fun.

The first, granddaddy of them all-

R alph
Baer
The man is
considered the
‘Father of video
games’, and with
good reason. Ralph
Baer is the man who
brought to us the
first commercially
sold game console in
1972, the Magnavox
Odyssey.

Mr. Baer was also

recently awarded
‘The National medal
of Technology’ by
the then president of
the United States on
February 13, 2006,
and has received
several other awards
for his pioneering work in the field of video games.

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Born – March 8, 1922

A cheerful man, Ralph Baer faced a lot of
hardship in his childhood. Born in Germany in Major contributions-
1922, He was expelled from school for being
Jewish, and had to go to an all-Jewish school.  The Magnavox
odyssey
A year or so before Hitler began taking over,  The first ‘light gun’
Ralph, his parents, and his sister left for the U.S.,  Simon
through Holland.

For a couple of years, he ran radio stores in New

York City that repaired all kinds of radios. In 1943, he served in the U.S. Army;
for a time he was in France. When he came back from the army, he attended a
college and graduated with a degree in Television Engineering. This was the
first time that this degree was given out.

The next few years, he worked at two

different companies as an engineer. In
1952, he married a girl named Dena.
They later had three children.

Then, until 1956, he worked at

another company as an engineer. In
1956, he started working for a company called Sanders Associates, Inc., where
he worked for quite some time.

In the summer of 1966, he had the idea for a video game. His idea was to be
able to play a game on the TV set when the TV was tuned to a specific channel.
He was the first to think of having to turn the TV to channel 3 or 4 to play a
video game.

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Baer started development of the "Brown Box" console video game system and
several other prototypes in 1966 for the defense-electronics company Sanders
Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire. In 1971, it was licensed to Magnavox.

And after being renamed Magnavox Odyssey, the console was released to the
public in 1972. For a time it was Sanders' most profitable line, though many in
the company looked down on game development.

Baer created the first light gun and game for home television use, sold grouped
with a game expansion pack for the Odyssey, and collectively known as the
Shooting Gallery, The light gun itself was the first peripheral for a video game
console.

The next major invention by Ralph

Baer was ‘Simon’, an electronic
game of rhythm and memory skill
invented by Ralph Baer and Howard
J Morrison.

It is named for the simple children's

game of ‘Simon says’.

The game unit has four large buttons,

one each of the colors red, blue,
2 The original 'Simon' green, and yellow.
The unit lights these buttons in a
sequence, playing a tone for each button; the player must press the buttons in
the same sequence. He is now partnered with Bob Pelovitz of MicroPROS
Technology Solutions, and they have been inventing and marketing toy and
game ideas since 1983. In 2006, Baer donated all his hardware prototypes and

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documents to the Smithsonian.

3The 'Brown box' in use

H ideo
Kojima

Hideo Kojima faced a lot

of nay-Sayers during his
early years.

Born in Tokyo, he held a

desire to become an artist
or an illustrator; he was

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often discouraged by societal norms of Japan which favored finding ‘safe’ and
well paying jobs.

He then joined Konami's MSX home computer division in 1986 as a designer

and 'planner'. Kojima's gameplay ideas were often overlooked initially, and due
to his lack of familiarity with programming was repeatedly snubbed for his
failures in his initial years at Konami. At one point Kojima considered leaving
the company, but stuck on.

And the whole industry is glad that he did, because he eventually took Konami
to heights the company could only have dreamed of.

Regarded as one of the top game designers in the

industry, Hideo Kojima has taken a decidedly
cinematic approach with his games, most notably
the Metal Gear Solid games that began on the
Playstation 1. The film-like directing style isn't
an accident; Kojima grew up fascinated by
movies, but neither games nor film were a
major career choice (he was actually an
economics major), but a natural attraction to
video games and an encounter with Super
Mario Bros. was enough to push Kojima into
game design.

Though Kojima spent many years at

Konami where he started in April 1986, the
road to his becoming a vice-president of the
Japanese development powerhouse was far from
smooth. His initial run on a series of MSX games
as a designer
was fraught Born – August 24, 1963
with blame Major contributions-
for low sales
and a regular  The Metal Gear/Metal
dismissal of gear solid series
 Snatcher series.
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 Boktai series.
Angad Singh Video game icons October 29, 2009

his oft-times unusual game ideas. It wasn't until he was allowed to release the
first Metal Gear in 1987 that the commercial success afforded him a little
leeway.

Kojima created the game franchise ‘metal gear’ which started with the NES
version titled ‘Metal gear’ itself.

Metal gear is one of the earliest examples of ‘stealth based gameplay’, and the
subsequent games in the series expanded the franchise considerably

With the release of Metal Gear Solid in 1998 for the PlayStation, Kojima
became an international celebrity among the video game media. Metal Gear
Solid was the first in the Metal Gear series to use 3D graphics and voice acting,
which gave a more cinematic experience to the game.

Hideo Kojima is also

responsible for the very
innovative game boy
advance games ‘Boktai:
The Sun Is in Your
Hand’ and ‘Boktai 2:
Solar Boy Django’
respectively. In this,
players take the role of
a young vampire hunter
who uses a solar
weapon which is
charged by a
photometric sensor on
the game cartridge (forcing them to play in sunlight)

The latest game that swept millions of gamers off their feet all over the world is
‘Metal gear solid 4: Guns of the patriot’ which used the powerful hardware of
the playstation 3 to the fullest to create a breathtaking gaming experience.

4 Stealth based gameplay in Metal gear solid 2

Currently Hideo
Kojima is the the

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Executive Corporate Officer Director of Kojima Productions. Formerly the vice

president of Konami Computer Entertainment Japan.

Ron Gilbert

In the early 1980's, when

the Commodore 64 home
computer was fairly new and
very exciting, a young college
student named Ron Gilbert
discovered the potential of the
C 64's BASIC programming
language. A potential for
creating games similar to those
he had seen -and fallen for- in
the arcades as a teen. Yet
harnessing the C 64's graphical
power with the crude BASIC
compiler was tedious work; a flexible library of
commands did not exist.

So Gilbert hacked the nights away to create one.

When he finally finished his extension
(appropriately named Graphics Basic),
it was able to move sprites around the screen and
perform other multitasking operations that were
new territory on the C 64 at the time.
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Even better than a job well done is a job well paid. Gilbert promptly sold
Graphics Basic to a company named Human Engineered Software and, having
meanwhile received his diploma in computer science, started to work there as
well. He spent about half a year at HESware, programming arcade games for
the C 64. None of them were ever released; the company went out of business.
Searching for a new job, Gilbert ended up at Lucasfilm Games. While the name
of director George Lucas' company radiated magic and fame in the movie
business, the video game department was still small, rather unknown and quite
unsuccessful. Gilbert earned his living by doing C 64 ports of Lucasfilm Atari
800 games. Soon tiring of mere rewriting, he was eager to create. He got his
chance in 1985.

A dark Victorian mansion populated by a mad scientist, his slightly retarded

offspring and strange aliens - an excellent setting for an adventure game. Ron
Gilbert and Lucasfilm artist Gary Winnick had come up with this idea during
several chats, and they saw the time fit to present it to the management. Not
surprisingly, the heads of Lucasfilm Games were reluctant to invest into a man
who had never designed a big game before. It took some time and a lot of
persuasive talks until Gilbert finally got the thumps up. The work on the graphic
adventure game Maniac Mansion for the C 64 began.

Ron Gilbert had a lot of plans for his program, and most importantly, he had a
very distinct idea of what he wanted it to feel like. The player had to be
connected to the game as directly as possible, to be able to concentrate on the
challenge that the world posed. Immersion
through intuitive controls? Major contributions-

That was not possible with the existing  The ‘monkey island’ series
technology, especially not with a parser.  Sam and max hit the road
Gilbert realised so some months into the  Creation of the SCUMM
project. As there was no tool that would engine
have allowed him to implement all his
ideas, he decided that one needed to be
created. So Gilbert programmed a scripting

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language that was named after the project it had been written for, the Script
Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, better known as SCUMM.

Maniac Mansion was released in 1986 and was an incredible success. Although
SCUMM proved to be the perfect technical frame for an adventure game, it
were the wacky characters and the light, ironical humour that captured the
player's hearts. Ron Gilbert had passed his baptism of fire as a designer, and he
had passed it with distinction. He did not have to plead for a project again. In
the following years, he was free to create what would become milestones of the
adventure game genre

6 Maniac mansion in action

The subsequent flurry of adventure games that followed were humorous,
engrossing and intuitive in every way. One of the most well known of the

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franchise being the ‘Monkey Island’ games, which brought to at least three
generations the capers of Guybrush threepwood and his lackeys.

‘The secret of monkey island’ the first in the series (released in 1990) was a
cleverly designed masterpiece of wit and humour. Ron Gilbert laid special
emphasis on the dialogues - conversations branched off to hilarious topics,
contained cross references, and were above all supposed to feel real.

Arguably the best dialogue-based puzzle in any adventure game to date is the
insult sword fighting of The Secret of Monkey Island, in which you had to
defeat your opponents by learning and answering abusive sentences rather than
by brute force.

7 Secret of monkey island

Ron works nowadays as Creative Director at Vancouver-based Hothead Games
development studio.

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Toru Iwatani
An early pioneer in the
Japanese videogame industry,
Toru Iwatani is the creator of
the beloved arcade hit Pac-
Man.

Toru Iwatani was born on

January 25, 1955 in Tokyo. His
knowledge in the field of
electronics and computer
science was completely self-
taught. In 1977 he joined
amusement manufacturer
Namco Limited, whose main
product lines at the time were
projection-based amusement
rides and light gun shooting
galleries. Iwatani had expected
that his job would involve
working on pinball machines,2 and was initially disappointed that he would
instead have to work on these strange, clinical 'video-games' instead.

designed the 1978 and 79 arcade releases Gee Bee, Bomb Bee, and Cutie-Q.
After working on these three titles, Iwatani wished to create a game that would
target women and couples; his goal was for game centers to shed their
somewhat sinister image for a lighter
Born- January 25, 1955
atmosphere, and he believed that the key to
doing that was to get girls to come in. Major contributions-
Iwatani's eureka moment came when he  Pac-Man
removed a slice of pizza from a pie, creating  Ridge racer
the visual inspiration for his next big thing. It  Time crisis
was in this moment that, according to
Iwatani, Pac-Man was officially born. Now
that he had the look, he needed that special something to attract his target
audience. After listening to girls talk to one another, Iwatani determined that
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food and eating would be the way to get the fairer sex interested in arcade
games.

In 1980, Pac-Man (renamed from "Puck Man" for fear that the arcade cabinet
would be defaced by smart-ass kids) was released in the US under Midway, and
the face of gaming was irrevocably altered.

On the technical
side of things, Pac-
Man's AI was
revolutionary; the
ghosts did not move
at random -- instead,
they moved around
the maps in four
distinct behavioral
patterns. However,
the real brilliance
behind Pac-Man
was its
unprecedented sense
of life. The act of
eating and the
terrified expressions of the ghosts as they fled a ravenous yellow disc tapped
into gamers' affinity for living things.

Iwatani later worked on other Namco games such as ‘Ridge racer’ and ‘time
crisis’ too.

He retired at the age of 52 in March 2007

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