Most of the genres a browser game today still borrows from — the platformer, the stealth game, the sandbox, the 4X strategy game, the life sim — trace back to a small handful of people who invented the template everyone else has been building on ever since. Here are six of them, and what they actually changed.
Shigeru Miyamoto (Japan) — Nintendo's "find the fun first" designer
Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977 as an artist, and created Donkey Kong in 1981 — the game that introduced a mustachioed carpenter named Jumpman, later renamed Mario. Super Mario Bros. (1985) turned platforming into the genre that arguably saved the home console industry after the 1983 crash, and The Legend of Zelda (1986) established the open-world action-adventure structure — explore, find items, gate progress behind puzzles — that most adventure games still use. His famously stated design philosophy is to prototype the core mechanic and make sure it's fun before writing a single line of story, which is a big part of why he's routinely called the most influential game designer alive.
Hideo Kojima (Japan) — the stealth genre, told like a film
Kojima's original Metal Gear (1987) was one of the first stealth games — partly a design choice, partly a workaround for the MSX2's inability to display many enemies on screen at once, which forced avoidance instead of combat. Metal Gear Solid (1998) turned that into a cinematic showcase, including boss fights that broke the fourth wall (a psychic enemy who could "read" your actual memory card, and could only be beaten by plugging your controller into the console's second port). After leaving Konami in 2015, he founded Kojima Productions and partnered with Sony on Death Stranding (2019), a delivery-and-traversal game wrapped in prestige-film production values and A-list actors.
Markus "Notch" Persson (Sweden) — Minecraft and the open-ended sandbox
Persson released the first public build of Minecraft in 2009 as a solo project before forming Mojang around it. Its procedurally generated, blocky voxel world had no fixed win condition — build, mine, survive, explore — and that open-endedness became one of the most copied design templates in gaming. Minecraft has since sold well over 300 million copies, making it the best-selling video game of all time; Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion in 2014.
John Carmack (USA) — the engine behind Doom and Quake
Carmack co-founded id Software in 1991 and programmed the engines under Wolfenstein 3D (1992, the game that popularized the first-person shooter), Doom (1993, true texture-mapped 3D plus LAN deathmatch and a modding scene built around shareable WAD files that arguably kick-started mod culture as a whole), and Quake (1996, id's first fully 3D engine with real-time lighting). He's less a narrative designer than a technical one — each release pushed real-time 3D rendering forward by years. He later became CTO of Oculus VR.
Sid Meier (USA) — "just one more turn"
Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 and created Pirates! (1987) and Railroad Tycoon (1990) before Civilization (1991) — a turn-based strategy game about building an empire across the whole of recorded history, and the game that gave the genre its defining addictive quality: "one more turn." He co-founded Firaxis Games in 1996, which still develops the series today.
Will Wright (USA) — simulation without a goal
Wright co-founded Maxis in 1987 and created SimCity (1989), a "software toy" with no win state — you build and manage a city for its own sake, not to beat a level. The Sims (2000) applied the same philosophy to individual lives and became one of the best-selling PC games ever made. Both games are built around the same idea: give the player real systems to play with and let them invent their own goals, rather than handing them one.
None of Elipar's own games are trying to be Civilization or Doom — but the same instincts show up in miniature: a turn-based AI worth outsmarting in Checkers or Chess, a real-time 3D world to explore in Haunted Castle or Derelict Station, all playable instantly with no install. Browse the Strategy and Adventure categories, or see the full catalog.