I'm not sure that in the present day of massive teams and > $100 million budgets that there's much room for new celebrity game developers to emerge on that scale. Pretty much every gamer knows who he is.
Now, even the biggest breakthrough indie game with a 5 person dev team wouldn't become a household name. These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit. Which may only be fair: When there's 100+ people on a project, it's such a group effort that singling out a handful doesn't really represent the achievement.
It’s not as recent as it seems in my mind, but Notch is a relatively well known game dev. And in the younger crowd he may be even well known than Carmack.
Ever since Mojang was sold to MS in 2014, I'd say his notoriety has dropped quite a bit. Most people that would have been familiar with him are now in their mid teens at the youngest.
Even before Notch left I'd say others like Jeb or Dinnerbone were more commonly known in the Minecraft communities as they were more active in the community & posting about upcoming things.
(then of course Notch went off the deep end and most communities rapidly began distancing themselves from him...)
And the fame associated with these names was only possible because they canes from a small indie group that broke through to the mainstream so massively successful that I can't think of any other example on that scale in the last decade.
In the 90's and early 00's, many big names practically were studio, the brand.
There are definitely still "well known names" in the indie scene. They may not hit mainstream success, but there's for example there's some pretty well known members of the Factorio team in the Factorio community (kovarex & Klonan come to mind). There's people like Maddy Thorson of Towerfall & Celeste fame. If they decide to embrace it I imagine one of the very few people on the team behind Valheim would also fit this, but it doesn't seem like they are interested in that.
There are still small indie groups that make breakout or successful games that hit mainstream awareness (Untitled Goose Game anyone?), but it seems like many prefer to use a company branded twitter than make their own name(s) public or just let the game stand on its own.
Sure, but they're not breakthrough names like Carmack & a few others, and are unlikely to be known by anyone not familiar with those particular games.
Carmack on the other hand is completely unavoidable if you even casually tune in to gaming news. I've never player a Doom game, but I know who Carmack is. In contrast, I've played 200+ hours of Factorio, and had no idea what the names of the developers were.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it takes much more than a breakout hit from indie devs to thrust them to Carmack levels of fame.
Part of it is likely due to technology changes. A big part of Carmack's fame initially stemmed not only from having a wildly popular game, but having done things with hardware that were practically magical at the time. The use of Binary Space Partitioning-- a not very well known technique for rendering that had, to my knowledge, never been used in videogames before was used by Carmack because he could not only program, he rises above the level of programmer to computer scientist. Many people study computer science in college or bootcamps, but most simply become programmers.
Compare that to today's game dev ecosystem: Even indies are typically using a variety of middleware and off-the shelf software to build there game. There is both less room and less need for the type of hackery of the Carmack era (which wasn't unique just to Carmack). These days if you want your game to do something more computationally intensive, you just do it, and up the minimum reqs from a gtx 950 to a gtx 960.
I think this is why the closes thing to the level of celebrity of a single dev we've had in a while is Notch w/ Minecraft. He didn't get there by pushing the boundaries of hardware to make something previously not possible, he simply put in long years of iterative design that results in a unique breakthrough hit that appealed to hugely different audiences. If we're looking for future celebrity devs, that's the sort I would expect, and they seem much more rare.
He's said some truly awful things. It's too bad people are downvoting you - this is part of the story of gamedev. Carmack would never say these kinds of things. Persson did. One is a famous and well-known and loved developer, the other is relegated to parroting talking points of alt-right/Nazi discussion boards and does not associate much with the rest of society.
Notch could have been more famous and well-loved than Carmack even, but his personality and hatred of minorities stopped that from happening.
Well; and when it boils down to it, what did Notch even really do for programming in general?
Minecraft is incredibly popular and very well made; but in no ways is it revolutionary or game-changing for the industry in the way Wolf3D or DOOM was.
There is essentially the game industry before and after DOOM.
Quake, similarly; changed the game; and, in fact - the engines for Quake/II and DOOM/II would go on to be the engine behind a quite massive quantity of games in the 90’s.
And then there’s Carmack’s massive contribution to FOSS by allowing us inside the code to learn how the craziness was constructed...
Honestly, there are only a handful of people in the world who even had the chance to make that kind of impact.
I guess you remember the names who make history. You remember the names of the astronauts who first went to the moon but no-one knows the names of the other people who went to the moon.
Jonathan is definitely not on the same scale as Notch. There is only a brief period where Jonathan was well known and mainly due to Indie Game: The Movie
That wasn't a dev coming out of a major studio though, which is what I think is significantly harder these days. Notch got there only because it was a small indie team that hit a black swan event to hit the mainstream in a massive way, at the same time that it caught fire on YouTube with many current game streamers and channels having their roots in the early days of Minecraft videos.
Had Minecraft come from a major studio, even hitting it just as big, I don't think we associate it nearly as much with particular devs, and I can't think of another indie hitting it like that in the last decade. But if big names do still emerge, I think it will be from small breakthrough indie teams.
Fame in gaming has largely moved into “content creators”. The most famous game developers are almost certainly YouTubers first and game developers second. There are some fairly big channels now that produce memey content about making games in nearly exactly the same way as people make memey content about Minecraft or Fortnite.
I think you may have a point. I don't play Fortnite, but I know who Ninja is, and casual observers of the gaming world pretty much know his name regardless of playing fortnite. (Though he's not a game dev).
It is an interesting trend that players can now become more famous for playing a game than the people that create the game. However I think that's only possible with the advent of user-created content: Minecraft gameplay on YouTube ~2012-2013 was a big driver in Minecraft's popularity and catalyst for mote activity like that. I think gaming culture would have reached this point without Minecraft, but as it stands right now it was the foundation of the massive gaming channels and streaming.
It’s not that unusual that players get famous for playing games rather than developers. Games are much more active way of engaging with media and playing the game is a far more common experience than making it.
Streaming and gaming personalities both pre-date Minecraft but for sure it’s had a massive cultural impact. Particularly in terms of the growth of an audience through all the kids participating.
I think you are right. The closest I can come to a modern example would be Darkest Dungeon (made by 2 people) and Slay the Spire/Stardew Valley (both made by single devs) however owing to your point I don’t remember their names despite reading about them at least a few times. I would recognize John Carmacks face in a crowded room not to mention obviously unlikely to ever forget his name.
Now that you mention it, I know the names of a few of the roguelikes I play. I think part of this stems from it being the work of very small teams that ALSO do all their own game marketing, so your “representative” for the game is the creator themselves.
Dwarf Fortress comes to mind, and I know it’s made by Tarn and his brother, but I don’t know their last name…but I guess it’s not exactly modern.
Similarly, Kyzrati/Josh Ge, of Cogmind & REXpaint fame, and pender/Brian Walker.
To the point above about “who does the representing,” even though I happen to know their names, I think of them by their monikers, pender and Kyzrati, not their real-world names.
I believe Megacrit, which built Slay the Spire, is two people, Casey Yano and Anthony Giovannetti. But to the broader point I knew the name of the studio off the top of my head while I needed to look up the names of the individuals.
> These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit.
It certainly serves the studios' interests to reduce their talents' market power. If customers recognized individual devs and wanted games made by them, those devs could demand more money and more influence.
Very true. Atari did it deliberately with their devs. Probably to their detriment: Having big name devs with their own brands would only have brought more attention to the market. Who cares if they make they own game studio? Atari would still get royalties on cartridges sold.
With today's game studios though, they aren't the platform owner, so a game dev with a personal brand branching off to do their own thing is still a net loss for them. I wonder if they have rules in place about that sort of thing. I could even take the appearance of something benign & reasonable: "No one talks to the press, everything to the press comes out of PR & marketing"
If that's the case, there may very well be a dozen Carmacks in the big dev studios that made something seemingly impossible happen, and without whom their games would simply have died, or been flops.
Then again with that level of fame, failures hit the individual quite a bit harder than the dev teams as well. Look at someone like Warren Spector, Richard Garriot, or Dennis Dyack. I might read each of their examples as situations where their singular influence on their games and rise to fame ultimately lead to their failures & blame as well. It created a lot of pressure (somewhat self-imposed to be sure) to do something bigger & better each iteration that they eventually couldn't keep up. A situation made worse along the way by financial backers giving them too much money to develop, meaning the devs didn't have to think as critically about what to include and what to prune from games. It lead to games that were a mess of shiny features or broken promises lacking a solid core. Fame cuts both ways.
Now, even the biggest breakthrough indie game with a 5 person dev team wouldn't become a household name. These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit. Which may only be fair: When there's 100+ people on a project, it's such a group effort that singling out a handful doesn't really represent the achievement.