In the digital art field, there's an incredible amount of really talented artists (or "freaks", to be honest) who can really blow you away with what they're capable of. In particular, the concept art field has many, many talented people, including the likes of Craig Mullins (this guy is absolutely amazing) and Feng Zhu. Modellers don't seem to get the same kind of fanfare as concept artists, but there are still quite a lot of talented folk doing fantastic stuff with Zbrush. Paul Steed is probably the most famous game modeller, he's great with low polygon modelling, but seems to have disappeared from the limelight for quite a while now.
I'm really curious though, who are the influential or absurdly gifted programmers in the games industry taht you admire, look up to, or gain inspiration from? Is John Carmack still the poster boy for a lot of programmers? Tim Sweeney? Any one else, and why?
For me it's Peter Molyneux, though I suppose he's probably more of a game designer than programmer. Back in his Bullfrog days, games like Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet and Theme Hospital were almost all original concepts in their day and remain some of my favourite games. I still pull them out on the odd occasion I feel like a bit of retro gaming. More recently, I thought Black & White was brilliant, and I haven't played The Movies yet but from all accounts it is living up to the hype. He's the sort of person I look up to simply because he's able to pull out these original ideas and make them work.
I'd still have to say John Carmack, because he manages to do all sorts of programming with a lot of different tech. I've come to realise that he's pretty much a good hacker in the sense that he can use the best tool for any job ad creat something good. However personally I'm not a fan of his coding style.
Of course there is Michael Abrash, but I haven't heard much from him recently, but I did enjoy watching his keynotes on Gamasutra when he was still into games programming. He was in the Microsoft DirectX team at some point, and now I do wonder what he's up to.
You also have to admire people like Justin Frankel (Winamp guy), mainly because he created something sleek and utterly useful (nevermind what AOL are doing to it now), and he also created lots of useful little utilities that he released for free (NSIS anyone?).
Andrei Alexandrescu- author of modern c++ design
Miller Puckette- father of the Max family of visual audio programming languages.
Paul Davis- the god of high end Linux audio programming and author of Ardour. Also the first programmer to join Amazon.
Barry Vercoe- author of Music11, CSound and SAOL audio synthesis languages.
Roger Dannenberg- head of the computer music research group at Carnegie Melon uni. Author of Serpent (realtime scripting language), Audacity, Nyquist (lisp based audio synth language) and tons of other stuff.
No game developers in my list. Sorry.
Edit: how on earth did I forget Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman!!
Obviously, Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman :)
Michael Abrash is a good pick, Daemin. It was some of Abrash's articles that got me fascinated in graphics programming in the first place. I believe Abrash wrote the renderer for Quake, although I'd say the fame was mostly enjoyed by John Carmack.
John Carmack has my respect as a programmer, but I wouldn't put him at the top of any programmer kudos list. Aside from his awesome capacity for finding performance optimisations, I have found his most recent projects (yeah, that one) to be rather unimpressive. There are many programmers building flexible and scalable engines for a variety of games, while Carmack's scope is largely limited to the kind of games he likes to make - which is fine by its own merit, but isn't enough to keep me paying attention anymore.
If there's a crown for FPS engine technology, I'd say it was stolen by Tim Sweeny a long time ago. IMHO, Sweeny's commitment to building a flexible engine for a wide variety of applications is hugely impressive. UE3's popularity as middleware for next generation titles is large.
Ultimately though, I'm not so preoccupied with graphics/game engine programmers. IMHO, some of the most impressive programmers are those working in R&D roles in fields such as Artificial Intelligence and Interaction Design. Programmers in these fields come up with incredibly creative solutions to all sorts of problems, yet seldom enjoy the fame that programmers like Carmack and Sweeny do.
Ooh, one more: The illustrious Yann Lombard, GameDev.net forum graphics/engine guru.
A thoughtful fanboy has erected a site linking to some of his more insightful posts: [url="http://triplebuffer.devmaster.net/misc/yannl.php"]clicky[/url].
Alfred Reynolds (VALVe) - good community mind, and wonderful at fixing bad bugs in the steam client, and the source engine - even if making some minor ones along the way...
Many of the app programers at experts-exchange.com (They have given me wonderful advice over the years)
Tim Holt, who many of you wont know unless your his student, is very well versed in his ideas, and conecpts, and good at returining code for both. - i only know him through the [hlcoders] mail list - but i look upto him in a peer (not god) way.
Apart from being constantly blown away by the resident gurus where I work, I'm always inpired by people that take simple ideas and techniques and make magic with them, such as [url="http://www.massivesoftware.com/stephen.html"]Stephen Regelous (Massive)[/url]. I also don't think I could let a thread like this go by without pointing again at [url="http://www.joelonsoftware.com"]Joel Spolsky[/url]'s excellent insights into how software gets made (people just expect it of me now).
That said, I can't help but feel that master programmers don't get the same glory and publicity as artists, designers etc. Perhaps because it's hard for any programmer to do anything by themselves, to get the true [url="http://www.selu.edu/kslu/auteurtheory.html"]auteur[/url] glow that Molineux, Wright etc have.