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Most Influential: Peter Molyneux and Gabe Newell

Who are the Top 10 Most Influential People in Gaming History? Who gets to pick? (I do)

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#9 Peter Molyneux - Populous+Black&White

1959 - Still with us
A computer game designer and game programmer, he is well known "God games" Populous and Black & White.  As well, "Business Strategy" games such as Theme Park and most recently, The Movies. Molyneux has acquired a reputation for issuing over-enthusiastic descriptions of games under development, which are found to be somewhat less ambitious when release (see John Romero for examples of other ego-driven statements).  The most well-known case of this was with the game Fable, released in 2004 without many of the features talked about by Molyneux in press interviews during development. After the release, Molyneux publicly apologized for overhyping the game.

Weird Facts: Peter Molyneux began his career in 1982 by distributing and selling floppy discs which contained video games for Atari and the Commodore 64.
Peter had an entire episode of G4's games retrospective series Icons devoted to him, during its third season.

#10 Gabe Newell - Notables: Half life

1962 - still fragging
A "Microsoft millionaire" after working 13 years for the company, Newell founded Valve in 1996 with Mike Harrington, another former Microsoft employee. He and Harrington used their money to fund Valve through the development of Half-Life.  What is Half-Life?