Roberta Williams
Credited as being one of the creators of the graphic adventure genre, Williams has titles including Mystery House (1980) and the King's Quest series (1986-2016) under her belt.
Initially inspired by the popularity of games such as Dungeons and Dragons in the 80s, she applied the similarly complex story-driven, role-play to the video game and took the gaming world by storm.
Rebecca Heineman
Formed by a love of gaming on her Atari 2600, Heineman's hobby would go on to play an important role in her career. Paired with an incredible win at the first-ever Space Invaders national championship, making her the first national video game tournament champion ever, it's perhaps unsurprising that she'd also rock the video game industry.
With titles including The Bard's Tale (1985), Crystal Quest (1989) and DOOM (1996), amongst others, she's been a pioneering voice in the world of game design and programming.
Kazuko Shibuya
Taking inspiration from the anime worlds of Space Battleship Yamato (1974) among others, Shibuya began working on her own artwork and animations. Soon enough though, as the world of animation lost its spark, a surprise role-change working for Square would change her trajectory quite drastically.
Combining a love for storytelling through animation alongside stellar artwork, Shibuya soon went from designing the graphics and manual for Alpha (1986), to working on the fantastical world of Final Fantasy (1987), creating anything from characters and spells, to menus and the game's opening bridge scene. Since then she's gone on to have involvement in elements of all Final Fantasy games produced.
Amy Hennig
Having originally planned to go into script writing for the movie scene, Hennig's chance role on Atari's ElectroPop (1989) gave her a brand-new and original medium to share stories with entirely new audiences.
Since her work on ElectroPop, Hennig went on to bring her craft to life in games such as Legacy of Kain (1996) and Uncharted (2007), as well as receiving recognition in the form of awards such as the Writers Guild of America Video Game Writing Award, Game Developers Choice Lifetime Achievement Award and a BAFTA Special Award, too.
Danielle Bunten Berry
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Berry felt the importance of games from early on, highlighting that it provided her family with quality time together at a point when this was something difficult for them to achieve. Though she would later attend university to study engineering, even opening up her own bike shop during her time there, it was her hobby creating text-based video games that would later form into her passion.
From creating, and selling, her own independent game Wheeler Dealers, her work garnered tremendous respect and soon landed her with a position at Electronic Arts, taking M.U.L.E. (1983) on as her first title, and pushing the boundaries of what a video game could be.
Berry once famously said that "games are a wonderful way to socialize," and we would 100% have to agree.
Kim Swift
Having graduated from DigiPen Institute of Technology, Swift and a few of her fellow graduates came together to create Narbacular Drop (2005), which, once present to Valve, would go on to to become the hit game Portal (2007).
With the groups' success on their original title, it was Swift's developmental contribution to titles including Left 4 Dead (2008) and Left 4 Dead 2 (2009), among others, that contributed to her being heralded as great mind within the gaming industry, even receiving recognition from the likes of Forbes, when featured as one of their "30 Under 30" influential figures in the video game industry.
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