Welcome to the People wing of the 2023 Shacknews Hall of Fame class. This category honors the individuals and teams who created games that touched our lives and changed the industry.
When you're finished, use the Table of Contents links below to visit other areas of the Shacknews Hall of Fame Class of 2023.
Former Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells was instrumental in the studio's rise to becoming one of the industry's most celebrated companies, and arguably Sony's most valuable first-party studio. He most notably played a key role in the creation and continuation of the Uncharted and The Last of Us franchises, but his contributions date back long before the two blockbuster series.
Wells was involved with some of the most memorable platformers of the early 2000s and late 90s, with credits on ToeJam & Earl, Gex, Crash Bandicoot, and Jak & Daxter. With a game development career spanning thirty years, Evan Wells is a welcome addition to Shacknews' 2023 Hall of Fame class.
As the first Black woman video game developer, Muriel Tramis is undoubtedly one of the medium's most notable people. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Tramis designed and worked on nearly a dozen video games, including Geisha and Lost in Time.
Tramis has continued to be an important figure in gaming, particularly in her home country of France. She is a vocal advocate for women in the industry, and continues to serve as an inspiration for many.
Lisa Su has been a key figure in the tech industry for nearly thirty years, starting with her days at IBM and Texas Instruments before eventually moving onto AMD, where she currently serves as CEO. Su has led AMD through a renaissance in PC gaming, partnering with various AAA studios and going head-to-head with NVIDIA.
Lisa Su was also a major factor in AMD’s push into the CPU space, with the success of the company’s Ryzen chips giving it a decent chunk of market share. To this day, Lisa Su is the face of AMD, often hosting the company’s annual events and unveiling new products.
Shacknews briefly discussed Segata Sanshiro when diving into the best video game commercials and TV ad campaigns of all-time. For those unaware, Segata Sanshiro was a gruff martial arts master who would travel Japan in his karate gi and beat up anybody who wasn't playing Sega Saturn.
Segata Sanshiro was a spokesperson unlike anything video games had ever seen and there hasn't been another like him since. He had an earworm of a theme song, he had a recognizable face, and he even had a story arc that concluded at the end of the Saturn's life cycle with him saving the planet. However, his influence is still felt to this day. Sega has since featured him in games like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and Project X Zone 2, but the publisher also brought him back to celebrate the Saturn's 25th anniversary back in 2019.
We, too, at Shacknews wish to celebrate Segata Sanshiro by recognizing his contributions as one of gaming's all-time best spokespeople.
Earlier this year, Nintendo remade one of its greatest Super Nintendo titles: Super Mario RPG. At the time, it was a title unlike anything in Nintendo's history and unlike any adventure Mario had ever been on to that point. The story was the vision of co-director Chihiro Fujioka. Along with the teams at Nintendo and Square Enix, which included Producer Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario set out on his first RPG adventure and the result was a new way to experience the Mushroom Kingdom and explore lands beyond it.
Fujioka's work on Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars alone makes him worthy of induction into the Shacknews Hall of Fame, as does his work as writer for Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. However, his work with Mario in the RPG realm was not finished. He went on to found AlphaDream in 2000, a studio that would take Mario on a new set of RPG journeys with his brother Luigi, starting with Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. AlphaDream has since become defunct and Fujioka appears to have settled into a life of playing the drums on Twitter (X), but his contributions to the Mario library, especially in the RPG realm, make him deserving of a Hall of Fame induction.
The success of the Metal Gear Solid franchise can be attributed to several people. There's obviously creator Hideo Kojima and lead voice actor David Hayter, but there are also some other names without whom the series wouldn't have gotten its start. One of them is Jennifer Hale, for whom the original Metal Gear Solid marked one of her first projects as a video game voice actress.
While Hale gave her voice to Naomi Hunter, that would be far from her only role in the video game world. She would go on to play small roles in hundreds of games, some of those games for massive properties like Marvel and Star Wars. However, the role that would eventually define her career would come in 2010 when she voiced the female Commander Shepard in BioWare's Mass Effect.
Hale's voice talents elevated Shepard to the pantheon of women protagonists in games alongside such luminaries as Metroid's Samus Aran and Tomb Raider's Lara Croft. The big difference here, though, is that players could approach the Mass Effect story however they want and in whatever direction they chose. Regardless of whatever direction they took Shepard, Hale's performance across the entire trilogy remained a consistent highlight.
Hale continues to contribute her voice talents to games to this day, whether it's a small role like some extra roles in Star Wars: The Old Republic or a recognizable main character like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart's Rivet. She's become one of the hardest working voice actresses in the game since that first prominent Metal Gear Solid role 25 years ago and has earned her place in the Shacknews Hall of Fame.
Chris Metzen is a name that needs almost no introduction for World of Warcraft fans. He joined Blizzard Entertainment in 1995 helping contribute art and voice performances to games like Warcraft 2, Diablo 2, and the original StarCraft. He would gradually work his way up to designing many of Blizzard's most prominent titles, growing into the role of Creative Director for what would become the MMORPG juggernaut that was World of Warcraft.
Metzen was eventually promoted to Senior Vice President of Story & Franchise Development, a title he would carry with him across World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Diablo 3, and Heroes of the Storm. Even with new business positions, he still contributed scripts and stories for several of Blizzard's games and is credited as one of the Creative Directors for Overwatch.
Metzen announced his retirement from games in September 2016 to be with his family. However, in the years since his departure, Blizzard became embroiled in various controversies and scandals. The studio that inspired many in the gaming world, partly because of his work, was suddenly in a position unlike any it had ever been in before. In looking to bounce back and return to the Blizzard of old, the studio reached back out to Metzen and announced in September 2023 that Metzen would return as Executive Creative Director of Warcraft to help guide that franchise into the future.
That led to one of the most memorable moments of BlizzCon 2023, where Metzen greeted a captive BlizzCon audience and announced World of Warcraft's roadmap that would envelop three separate expansions. Metzen, as part of his new role, will guide World of Warcraft into uncharted territory that promises to keep the MMORPG thriving for years to come. While his body of work is vast, his BlizzCon speech helped cement his place in the 2023 class of the Shacknews Hall of Fame.
The video game industry has a long history of hiring writers from other fields to write stories. That tradition dates back to Mabel Holmes, the industry’s first writer and narrative designer. In fact, Holmes left her mark on the industry before it formally existed. Born in 1912, Holmes found employment as a teacher and as the author of historical articles and oral histories. In the 1960s, she was hired by IBM and the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, a program designed to promote education throughout New York State, to write The Sumerian Game, the first text-only computer game.
Many historians point to Adventure, also known as Colossal Cave Adventure, as the first text-based game. (A fun bit of trivia: Adventure for the Atari 2600 was a graphical adaptation of that title.) Holmes’ Sumerian Game predates it, making it not only the first of its kind, but the first video game written for an electronic computer. Unlike Colossal Cave Adventure, The Sumerian Game is a strategy game where players oversee the Sumerian city of Lagash. You have to manage resources as you see to concerns such as population growth, available farmland and farmers to work it, and harvesting and storing grain. Gameplay proceeds over rounds, and there are three distinct eras where you control separate rulers to create continuity and the passage of time. Like other pioneering titles such as Colossal Cave Adventure and The Oregon Trail, The Sumerian game was played by entering text commands into a teletype, an all-in-one keyboard and printer. The player’s commands were sent to a mainframe, which crunched data and sent back a response that was printed on the teletype’s paper.
Mabel Holmes passed away in 2004. She was posthumously awarded the Pioneer Award at the 2023 Game Developers Conference, enshrining her among designers she influenced whether they were aware of it or not.
Linus Torvalds was introduced to computers when he sat down to a VIC-20 at age 11. Like many of his peers at the time, he learned to program in BASIC and progressed to writing assembly code. Software was hard to find in his native country of Finland. After Torvalds received a Sinclair QL, he wrote his own assembler (the program in which coders write in assembly), and heavily modified its operating system to expand its functionality.
Those early experiments led him to create Linux, a free and open-source operating system seen as an alternative to proprietary OSes such as Windows and Mac OS. His work on Linux began as a lark: he had acquired a PC with a 386 processor and decided to write a free operating system just for fun. He admitted that it would be cruder than operating systems backed by companies such as Microsoft and Apple, but the decision to make it open source meant that anyone could contribute to it, or even spin off their own “kernels” (the program at the heart of an OS).
Linux’s mascot, a penguin named Tux, was created by Torvalds, and has become one of the most recognizable icons in the software industry. Long considered an underdog, Linux and its many offshoots have become more prominent in the gaming industry. Valve’s Steam Deck handheld is powered by SteamOS, a Linux kernel optimized for gaming.
Although still in effect today, Moore’s Law was a guiding force in technology from the 1960s through the 2000s. Computer scientist Gordon Moore defined it when he observed that the number of transistors that engineers could pack into a computer chip would double every two years, and that the cost of transistor would decrease as the number of transistors in chips increased.
Moore predicted that this observation would hold true for at least 10 years. His observation, codified as Moore’s Law, remained a force for much longer. Personal computers alone, among other electronics, advanced in leaps and bounds throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. For the last several years, however, Moore’s Law has been waning. The complexities of semiconductor processes are growing even as the chips themselves are shrinking. They’re so small, in fact, that it's taken engineers multiple attempts to reproduce advancements.
What this means in a nutshell is that the death of Moore’s Law will slow computing technology. Slow, but not kill. Improvements will be made possible by harnessing the power of more computers. Even when Moore’s Law is rendered as obsolete as the technology it predicted would be eclipsed in record time, the impact it has had on computing fields, including gaming, cannot be underestimated.
Like so many game developers in the early ‘90s, Mike Wilson launched his career with the help of Doom. He entered the industry as the vice president of DWANGO, a fan-made platform that connected players to deathmatch and co-op sessions in Doom before the ubiquity of the Internet. From there, he caught the attention of id Software and joined the company to help with marketing and publishing efforts.
Since leaving id a few years later, Wilson went on to co-found some of the industry’s most well-known indie publishers, from Gathering of Developers (GOD) to Gamecock Media Group and Devolver Digital. As of his induction into the Shacknews Hall of Fame, he serves on the advisory board of Take This, a non-profit focused on mental health awareness in the video game industry.
Dan and Sam Houser were in the right place at the right time. While working at publisher BMG Interactive, they came across a game called Race ‘n’ Chase developed by DMA Design, a development house best known at the time for Lemmings. The Housers saw potential in the game, signed BMG as the publisher, and suggested to DMA’s developers that they change the title to Grand Theft Auto.
After BMG was sold to Take Two Interactive, Dan and Sam Houser moved to New York and co-founded Rockstar Games. Dan took the helm as lead writer for many of Rockstar’s games included the GTA series, Red Dead Redemption, and Max Payne 3. Sam was credited as defining much of the look, feel, and sound for Grand Theft Auto III, one of the most influential video games of all time. While they have garnered fame for their work in the game industry, the Houser brothers tend to steer clear of interviews and other media spotlights, preferring that all of Rockstar Games receives credit for the company’s numerous critical and blockbuster hits.
Everyone knows pocket monsters are the real stars of the Pokemon franchise, but fans needed a character in which they could see themselves when the worldwide phenomenon was translated into an anime in the late ‘90s. Similar to other popular anime characters such as the eponymous Naruto, Ash Ketchum isn’t a natural at “catchin’ em all.” He’s a normal kid with big dreams and the determination to make them come true, even if he has to fail and try again (and again).
Not content to catch Pokemon in the magical Pokeballs, Ash endeavors to befriend them and gain their respect. His popularity soared to heights as great as that of Pikachu: In North America, fans of the games and anime clamored for merchandise featuring Ash and Pikachu. Ash remained at the center of the Pokemon anime over 25 seasons and is still the first non-pocket monster fans think of when the series comes to mind.
Many historians and players point to the 1990s and early 2000s as developer Rare’s golden era. Grant Kirkhope’s scores contributed much of that acclaim. His soundtracks worked hand-in-hand with art direction to set the look and tone of many of Rare’s most celebrated games from Killer Instinct 2 and GoldenEye 007 to Donkey Kong 64 and Perfect Dark. His multi-faceted talents graced other games, such as Kirkhope playing live guitar for Blast Corps on Nintendo 64, Star Fox Adventures, and Conker: Live and Reloaded. A favorite achievement of both Kirkhope’s and his fans is the “Donkey Kong rap” featured in Donkey Kong 64, a track as intentionally ridiculous as it is infectiously joyous and catchy.
Kirkhope’s contributions to video game soundtracks stretch far beyond his time at Rare. He has worked on dozens of games such as Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, Civilization: Beyond Earth, World of WarCraft: Shadowlands, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and Minecraft Dungeons, among many others.
As a freelance computer game developer in the 1980s, Jordan Mechner worried that he might be too late to leave his mark. Many of his peers had enjoyed commercial success developing clones of popular coin-op games such as Space Invaders for the Apple II and other PCs, but Mechner’s own attempt to sell a clone occurred at a time when lawyers for game publishers were cracking down on copycats.
Rather than give up, Mechner focused on crafting games with unique premises coupled with jaw-dropping technologies. He filmed his brother performing athletic stunts, used rotoscoping (the process of tracing and digitizing live footage frame by frame) to animate him, and created the martial arts sensation Karateka. Later beat-em-ups such as Double Dragon and Final Fight threw mobs of enemies at players. Karateka set players against powerful opponents one at a time, creating a blend of beat-em-up and on-on-one fighting game years before Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat popularized the latter genre.
Broderbund was stunned at the fluidity of Mechner’s Apple II game and published it to great success. Mechner’s next game proved even more popular. Again filming his brother and rotoscoping his movements, Mechner imagined a story where an adventurer falls in love with a princess and is imprisoned by the evil vizier with designs on the princess’s kingdom. Prince of Persia was significantly more impressive than Karateka on both gameplay and technical levels. Where Karateka had players moving linearly through one-on-one fights, Prince of Persia gave them 60 real-time minutes to run, jump, and duel their way through 12 levels filled with traps, pits, guards, and puzzles.
Prince of Persia released for Apple II in 1989, where it was met with some critical success due to most publishers and players having moved on to more advanced computers. The game’s arrival on the Mac sporting slicker graphics catapulted Prince of Persia and Jordan Mechner to legendary status. Mechner went on to create 1993’s Prince of Persia 2, the cerebral and immersive The Last Express adventure game, and worked with Ubisoft on 2003’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a reimagining of Mechner’s groundbreaking world.
“Kept you waiting, huh?” David Hayter’s gravelly voice has been one of Metal Gear protagonist Solid Snake’s defining characteristics since 1998’s Metal Gear Solid upped the ante for cinematic storytelling. Hayter’s pre-Metal Gear acting spanned a part in the live-action sitcom Major Dad and as the voice of Captain America in the 1994 Spider-Man animated series. His turn as Solid Snake came as Metal Gear was, like so many popular franchises, making the jump from two dimensions to three.
Playing Solid Snake catapulted Hayter to greater renown and more work as an actor. He voiced characters in the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, the 2002 horror classic Eternal Darkness on Nintendo GameCube, and as characters in popular anime shows such as Street Fighter II V and Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket.
Although Kiefer Sutherland voiced Snake in Metal Gear Solid V, David Hayter’s legions of fans will always associate him with the character, and vice versa.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time famous cast players as both child and adult Link in an adventure spanning seven years. It was only appropriate that the Link of each era be voiced by a separate talent. Nobuyuki Hiyama and Fujiko Takimoto have lending their voices to characters in anime and video games since the early 1990s, and voiced adult and young Link, respectively.
Some of Takimoto’s video game credits include voicing young Link in 1998’s Ocarina of Time, 2000’s Majora’s Mask, 2014’s Hyrule Warriors, and 2018’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Outside of her work in Nintendo’s Zelda series, she has voiced characters in Grandia (1997), Clock Tower: Ghost Head (1998), Soulcalibur (1998) and Soulcalibur 2 (2002), and Namco x Capcom.
Hiyama was cast as adult Link for several reasons, but two include his classification as a metallic lyric tenor, a register common to coming-of-age male characters; and for the passion of his battle cries. Besides voicing adult Link in Ocarina of Time, his battle cries issued forth from Fierce Deity Link in Majora’s Mask. His work in television is even more prolific, and spans an episode of popular anime Demon Slayer, the 2003 video game .hack//Legend of the Twilight, and 2005’s Pokemon: Battle Frontier, among dozens of others.
It can be said at this point that without Tom and Tony Cannon and their company, Radiant Entertainment, the fighting game community would simply not be what it is today. They created the Evolution Championship Series (better known as EVO) and, with it, gave players the premiere spotlight necessary to elevate fighting games as one of the most passionate competitive communities in gaming and esports.
Of course, it’s fair to say that the Cannons could never have guessed that EVO would take off the way it did. Back in the day, it was a far more low-key affair known at the time as the Battle by the Bay. In fact, B3: Battle by the Bay in Sunnyvale, California only had 40 competitors, trifling compared to the thousands we’ve seen in the competition nowadays. However, it was the start of something amazing. It was on the grounds of the early EVOs that we saw rivalries formed. It was on those grounds that we received the hallowed EVO Moment 37 in which Daigo Umehara pulled off the most immaculate of comebacks against Justin Wong to win Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. EVO has had its ups and downs, but it’s arguably in a better position than ever and that’s in no small part because of what the Cannons built.
It's not just tournaments they put together either. The Cannons were also responsible for the creation of GGPO, a middleware networking system that allowed fighting games to be played as a near-lagless experience. This would come to be the forebearer of what we know today as rollback netcode in most fighting games. In fact, games like Skullgirls and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition used it throughout their existence, and then Tom Cannon sweetened the deal by making GGPO open source.
The Cannons do not sit on their laurels. Even in 2022/2023, they were developing Project L for Riot Games, which is a team-based fighter set in the League of Legends universe. With League of Legends players excited to use their favorite characters in a new spinoff title and fighting game players excited about the team combat akin to games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Project L reaches across the aisles of competitive gaming in a way few other titles can do.
The FGC as we know it owes a lot of its current foundations to the Cannons, and despite all they gave, they continued to do more. Whether it’s EVO, GGPO, Project L, or even the (now defunct) Shoryuken community site, there’s a lot we wouldn’t have in community, competition, and the games we play in both if not for their contributions. They gave players the grounds to make history, and with it, history has been made many times over.
If you’ve spent any amount of time playing JRPGs over the last three decades, there’s a good chance you’ve heard Yatsunori Mitsuda’s musical efforts in a video game. Many will recognize him best for his composing of both the Xenogears and Chrono Cross soundtracks, but his contributions run even further back to Final Fantasy V, as well as up to recent hit titles like Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
In 1992, Mitsuda joined Square Enix (then just Square) right out of college. Although he was working as a sound designer and contributed sound effects to Final Fantasy 5, Secret of Mana, and Romancing SaGa 2, he felt he wasn’t doing enough to move up and make better money. His chance came when he gave Hironobu Sakaguchi an ultimatum to let him compose or he’d quit. Sakaguchi gave him the chance to prove himself on a fateful title: Chrono Trigger. Mitsuda crafted much of the soundtrack for the game and worked so hard that his health was allegedly harmed by it. However, Nobuo Uematsu stepped in to aid in the finalization of tracks for the game.
Even so, Mitsuda had made his mark and would be recognized for it. In the years ahead, he given far more opportunities and arguably excelled in each one. He was the main composer for both Xenogears and Chrono Chross, both legendary PS1-era Square titles that would go on to be classics of the console. He also went on to provide music for the Shadow Hearts series, the Inazuma Eleven series, and even Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
When Monolith Soft began producing the Xenoblade Chronicles series for the Nintendo Switch, Mitsuda wouldn’t be involved much in the first game beyond its ending theme, but he would go on to be the top-billed composer for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and onward with the team at ACE, as well as Kenji Hiramatsu and Manami Kiyota. Even in 2023, Mitsuda played an important role in the music for Sea of Stars alongside Eric W. Brown, fitting since Sea of Stars developer Sabotage Studio credits Chrono Trigger as a major influence.
Mitsuda’s work throughout the music of video games has been vast and awe-inspiring. His music has arguably been accentuated the emotions felt by millions of players across the games he has contributed, whether you were battling through time in Chrono Trigger in 1995, defying the gods in Xenogears in 1998, or fighting to change the fate of nations in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in 2022. Square bet big on Yasunori Mitsuda when it gave him the ground to run back in the 1990s, and three decades later, he can be considered a major part of what makes video game soundtracks so incredible.
