Hideo Kojima
The first Metal Gear, in 1987, was built around avoiding enemies rather than shooting them, and stealth as a mainstream genre essentially begins there. So does the Kojima habit of turning a constraint into an argument.
He is a film obsessive who ended up in games and never pretended otherwise; he even appears as an uncredited extra in the 2000 action film Versus. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty remains the most audacious thing a blockbuster game has done to its own audience, a bait and switch about information and control that arrived in 2001 and made more sense every year afterwards. Guns of the Patriots in 2008 and Peace Walker in 2010 pushed the cinematic instinct further, occasionally past the point where anyone was still playing rather than watching. Zone of the Enders, from the same period, is what he makes when he is not carrying a franchise.
He now runs his own studio, Kojima Productions, where he made Death Stranding and its sequel, taking the same willingness to bore an audience on purpose and building an entire game out of it. The industry has long since returned its verdict: a BAFTA Fellowship, the Game Awards Industry Icon award, and a Game Developers Choice lifetime achievement award.
Movies (3)
TV (1)
Games (6)
Where to start with Hideo Kojima
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is the one to play if you only play one, and go in knowing as little as possible. It is the most argumentative blockbuster game ever made, and the parts that annoyed people in 2001 are the parts that look prophetic now.
For the origin, Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake are both still playable and both surprisingly hard, and the second is the better game by a wide margin. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is the maximalist late entry, and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker the tightest of the later ones, designed for a handheld and better for the discipline.
Outside the franchise, Zone of the Enders is the pure action-toy version of his instincts. Metal Gear Solid 3: Existence is the feature-length cut of a game's cutscenes, which is either the best or the worst argument for his whole approach, and Video Games: The Movie has him talking about it.