Game Developers Conference Pioneer Award recipients

Markus Alexej Persson (born 1 June 1979), also known as "Notch", is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is best known for creating the sandbox video game Minecraft, which has since become the best-selling video game in history; and for founding the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson is currently working on new games under the banner of Bitshift Entertainment.

Gabe Logan Newell (born November 3, 1962), nicknamed Gaben, is an American businessman, the co-founder and president of the video game developer and digital distribution company Valve. Educated at Davis Senior High School and attending Harvard University from 1980 until dropping out in 1983, Newell joined Microsoft, where he, over the course of thirteen years, helped create the first iterations of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Together with Mike Harrington, he left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve.

Roberta Williams (born February 16, 1953) is an American video game designer, writer, and a co-founder of Sierra On-Line (later known as Sierra Entertainment), who developed her first game while living in Simi Valley, California. She is most famous for her work in the field of graphic adventure games with titles such as Mystery House, the King's Quest series, and Phantasmagoria. She is married to Ken Williams and retired in 1999. Roberta Williams is one of the most influential PC game designers of the 1980s and 1990s, and has been credited with creating the graphic adventure genre.

Ralph Henry Baer (born Rudolf Heinrich Baer; March 8, 1922 – December 6, 2014) was a German-American inventor, game developer, and engineer.

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (born 14 March 1956) is a Russian video game designer and computer engineer who developed Tetris while working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D center.

Yu Suzuki (鈴木 裕, Suzuki Yū, born June 10, 1958) is a Japanese game designer, producer, programmer, and engineer, who headed Sega's AM2 team for 18 years. He has been responsible for a number of Sega's arcade hits, including three-dimensional sprite/texture-scaling games such as Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run, and After Burner, and pioneering polygonal 3D games such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, which are credited with popularizing 3D graphics in video games, as well as the critically acclaimed Shenmue series of Interactive films. As a hardware engineer, he led the development of various arcade system boards, including the Sega Space Harrier, Model 1, Model 2, and Model 3, and was involved in the technical development of the Dreamcast console and its corresponding NAOMI arcade hardware.

Jordan Mechner (born June 4, 1964) is an American video game designer, author, screenwriter, and filmmaker. He is best known for designing and programming the Broderbund Apple II games Karateka and Prince of Persia in the 1980s, the latter of which grew into a multi-platform franchise.

Alexander Peter "Alex" Rigopulos is the CEO of Harmonix Music Systems, a company he founded with Eran Egozy in 1995. Rigopulos personally cites Japanese game designers Masaya Matsuura, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and Keita Takahashi as some artists that have inspired his work at Harmonix. Rigopulos and Egozy were listed in Time Magazine's 2008 list of the 100 most influential people for their work on Rock Band.

Robert A. Whitehead (born November 1, 1953) is an early game designer and programmer. While working for Atari, Inc. he wrote two of the nine Atari Video Computer System launch titles: Blackjack and Star Ship. After leaving Atari, he cofounded third party video game developer Activision, then Accolade. He left the video game industry in the mid-1980s.

Chip Morningstar is an American author, developer, software programmer and designer of software systems, mainly for online entertainment and communication.