Every year, the reporters at Forbes look for up-and-coming stars in the industries we cover. We search for people who are doing groundbreaking work, disrupting traditional business models, and establishing themselves as leaders.
You can see the results today, in a series of lists known as 30 Under 30. This feature consists of fifteen lists of people under the age of thirty, each of whom are changing the face of a different business. The industries we look at include music, finance, sports, healthcare and science... and of course, video games.
This year, Forbes honored the young stars who make games and software in a list we call 30 Under 30: Games & Apps. With the help of nominations from readers around the world and a panel of judges that included professional gaming legend Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, we've identified some of the brightest young stars in the business.
They include Kim Swift, the designer who led the team that developed the 2007 smash hit Portal. Last month, Portal was one of 14 games selected by the Museum of Modern Art for inclusion in their permanent collection. Now creative director at Airtight Games, Swift's most recent game is 2012's Quantum Conundrum.
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Two of our list members worked on one of 2012's top-rated games. Matt Charles, a producer at Gearbox Software, led the development of Borderlands 2, one of the most ambitious and best-reviewed games of 2012. Anthony Burch helped write Borderlands 2 --but you also might know him as the co-creator and co-star of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?, an independently-produced web series about video games.
Several stars from the emerging business of e-sports made the list, including Alexander Garfield, CEO of Evil Geniuses, the world’s leading professional video gaming team; and Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch, a video platform and community for gamers which has 23 million unique viewers per month.
Indie game developers made their mark too, including John Graham, co-creator of the Humble Indie Bundles; Amir Rao, co-creator of the action role-playing video game Bastion; and Greg Rice, the producer of Double Fine Adventure, which raised $3.45 million in a groundbreaking Kickstarter campaign.
When Matt Nava was an art director at thatgamecompany, he created the look of critically-beloved games including Flower and Journey; Brian Cho is a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and one of the few young investors who really gets the game business; Palmer Luckey is the founder of Oculus Rift, a consumer-priced virtual reality headset; Anton Mikhailov helped develop the PlayStation Eye and PlayStation Move for Sony; Dan Gerstein creates and maintains the code that allows Activision's Skylanders toys to come to life inside a game.
To see all of the members of this year's list, check out the links below.
GAMES & APPS: The Forbes 30 Under 30
VIDEO: The Woman Who Made Portal
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