Who Would You Put Into A Video Game Hall of Fame?

[Moonface]

While there is a World Video Game Hall of Fame, it currently only inducts video games. I've had this thought for a long time though about if there was a Hall of Fame for individual people from the gaming industry, who would you induct?

I feel like there are some really clear-cut ones who everyone would expect to see receive an induction:

• Satoru Iwata
  
• Shigeru Miyamoto
  
• Ken Kutaragi
  
• Masahiro Sakurai
  

...and now my mind has gone blank on names which annoys me because I know there are other people who would be in that list.

[Maniakkid25]

• Nobuo Uematsu
  
• Koji Kondo
  
• Yasunori Mitsuda
  
• David Wise
  
• Grant Kirkhope
  
• Martin O'Donnell
  
• Motoi Sakuraba
  
• Yoko Shimomura
  

Those people have easily earned their right to fit in to any music-related hall of fame position. Some other names I could think of:

• Hideo Kojima (Mastermind behind Metal Gear, among many others)
  
• Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy. Need I say more?)
  
• John Carmack (Legend of programming; dude once heard texture mapping was a thing, and immediately said "I could do that.")
  
• Rebecca Heineman (Co-founder of Interplay, one of the biggest video game publishers of its time. The girl has been in the game since the 80s. She's earned her stripes)
  
• Warren Spector (Director and Producer of Deus Ex, one of the most important games of all time)
  
• Richard Garriot (The legend behind the Ultima Series)
  

This is where my memory starts to fail me, but if I think of anything else, you can bet I'll add them.

[Moonface]

• Rebecca Heineman (Co-founder of Interplay, one of the biggest video game publishers of its time. The girl has been in the game since the 80s. She's earned her stripes)
  

Had to look up the company because I'd never heard of them, and it's probably because I haven't played a single game they have ever published to see their name before.
I saw there was another founder, Brian Fargo, who also has a Wikipedia page, so checked it out to see if he had been in the industry as long as Heineman has been and got distracted from the answer by the opening description of him mentioning he was on IGN's Top 100 Game Creators list: https://www.ign.com/top/game-creators/

The page is old as dicks but could be something to reference for people we can't remember or anything.

[Maniakkid25]

Interplay went bankrupt in the early 00s, so its not a surprise you've never heard of them. They were the original publishers of the Fallout series, before they sold the rights to Bethesda. Make no mistake, though, they were a significant player in the 80s and 90s.

[Moonface]

Interplay went bankrupt in the early 00s, so its not a surprise you've never heard of them. They were the original publishers of the Fallout series, before they sold the rights to Bethesda. Make no mistake, though, they were a significant player in the 80s and 90s.

They did, although it doesn't seem they died as a result from it since they're still going, although it has been ten years since a game released under them in some form. If they hadn't had to sell off Fallout or Baldur's Gate it makes me wonder how the company would be doing today given the success of the Fallout games that came after they sold the rights to Bethesda, and the massive success of Baldur's Gate 3. The best they might get is income from any of the games they published in those series, but that depends on whether them selling off the rights meant the income of existing games went with it too.