It’s Black History Month in the United States, and therefore a perfect time to highlight the careers of some of the Black game developers that have helped build out our industry and continued to see it grow. For every Todd Howard and Hideo Kojima, there are dozens and even hundreds of names you don’t know without whom your favorite games simply wouldn’t exist. The following list is by no means exhaustive, but means to highlight a few of those fine folks in roughly chronological order!
Jerry Lawson
Jerry Lawson wasn’t just one of the first Black computer engineers in America – he also holds the esteemed title of the creator of the video game cartridge. That’s right, if you’ve played any game on a cartridge, ever, that experience was brought to you by Lawson. He designed the Fairchild Channel F video game console in 1976 which was the first console to use swappable cartridges so it could play more than one game (what a concept), revolutionizing gaming forever. In addition, he and his team created the 8-way joystick and the Pause Button, which had both never been seen before. A founding member of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of early computer nerds, he was close friends with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the days before they ever conceived Apple.
Muriel Tramis
Muriel Tramis is the first ever Black woman video game designer, and doubly has the distinction of leading the team that created Full Motion Video. That’s right, you Night Trap fans owe her big time. Before moving into gaming, Tramis worked for the French state-owned aerospace tech company Aérospatiale as a programmer for unmanned aerial vehicles. She took that tech know-how to game studio Coktel Vision in 1986, writing and directing a huge slate of popular adventure games such as Méwilo, Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness, Geisha, Fascination, Lost in Time, Urban Runner, and most notably Gobliiins alongside Pierre Gilhodes. She was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 2018, and has spent her life as an advocate for getting both women and minorities alike opportunities in France’s gaming industry.
Gordon Bellamy
If there’s one name here you’ve heard before, it’s likely Gordon Bellamy. As an early consultant for MTV, Bellamy directed and co-created the Spike TV Video Game Awards (the precursor to the Game Awards) and GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley. He also served as Executive Director of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, now known for the D.I.C.E. Awards, in addition to spending over a decade working as a producer at EA on the Madden franchise in the 1990s and 2000s. As the director of the incredibly well-received Madden ’95, he fought EA to have the game represent the actual number of Black players in the NFL, seeing as the previous game in the series, John Madden Football, had only white players. Really. He even scored having Black NFL players Erik Williams and Karl Wilson on the cover! Bellamy’s love of sports games was driven by his exclusion from real sports as a gay man, and his activism for the LGBTQ+ community over the decades is just a small part of his resume.
Brian Jackson
Brian Jackson did a full gambit of the AAA games industry in the 1990s and 2000s, working at EA, Microsoft, Bethesda Softworks, and Nerjyzed Entertainment. He was a designer on a little game you might have heard of called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, as well as IHRA Drag Racing – Sportsman Edition, NFL Fever, NBA Inside Drive, NCAA March Madness, Madden NFL Football, College Football USA, and Viewpoint. His major claim to fame is directing the only Black college football game ever made to this date, BCFX – The Black College Football Experience, featuring 40 teams from historically Black colleges across America. He also is responsible for pushing EA on their sports franchises to actually make and market their games for Black gamers, which it’s reported they internally were actively resisting in the 1990s.
Lisette Titre-Montgomery
Lisette Titre-Montgomery entered the games industry in 2001 as a humble character modeler for Freekstyle and Gretzky NHL 2005. From there, she’d move to working as a character designer. artist, and special effects artist at EA on games including Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 and 07, Dante’s Inferno, Dance Central 3, and the unkillable titan The Sims 4. She also briefly worked with Ubisoft as the art director for South Park: The Fractured But Whole before moving to DoubleFine Productions as the art director for Psychonauts 2, guiding the team to much critical acclaim and nominations for herself in Best Art Direction from The Game Awards and the BAFTAs. Titre-Montgomery has been outspoken about the importance of inclusivity, leading talks everywhere from NASA to Google, and has prominently sponsored the organizations Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code. She presently serves on the board of Gameheads, a nonprofit assisting teenagers of color pursue tech careers, and is a member of the US Department of State’s Speakers Bureau as the representative for the Games and Tech Education sector.
Karisma Williams
Karisma Williams is an American game designer and UI/UX specialist who has worked through the 21st century with Xbox, EA, and presently her own UX studio Matimeo. Back in the early 2000s, she served as lead designer on the Xbox Kinect, developing its entire UI and UX from menus to interfaces to the movement-interaction models. She later would develop in-house motion capture technology for Xbox that would be used on many Xbox 360 and Xbox One titles. She also designed the UI/UX for Microsoft’s now-defunct HoloLens as well as games like Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, FIFA ’23, NFL ’23 and ’24, the Dead Space Remake, and the classic Stubbs the Zombie. Her most prominent contribution to gaming is building the UI/UX for Xbox Live when it launched in 2007, shaping how we interact online to this day. Williams’ designs for the first ever online gaming lobbies are still visible today in games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, and she has spent many years advocating for young women and Black developers alike to follow in her footsteps.
Dinga Bakaba
French game developer Dinga Bakaba may look familiar from his historic award win in the Best Game Direction category at the The Game Awards 2021 for his directorial debut Deathloop. Bakaba began his career in QA testing mobile games, working his way up to a game designer at Wizarbox and Playlogic. In 2010, he joined Arkane Studios as a systems designer for their upcoming first game, the legendary Dishonored. He made his way up to a lead designer on Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider, finally directing their next game Deathloop and being promoted to studio head. He’s currently directing Arkane’s Blade under Xbox in partnership with Marvel. Bakaba has been an activist from the start, fighting for better representation for Black people in gaming alongside his vocal support of unions and social justice against his own parent company Microsoft. He consistently pushes the games industry to understand that more diverse representation of our characters is simply the natural result of all kinds of people finally starting to get a say, and not a “diversity tick box.”
Brittney Morris
Brittney Morris is an American game narrative writer and award-winning novelist working since the early 2010s in the world of literature. In addition to her popular young adult novels SLAY and The Jump, she’s worked on a wide variety of games both AAA and indie as a writer and narrative designer in the late 2010s and 2020s. In the indie space, Morris worked as a writer on Subnautica: Below Zero and The Lost Legends of Redwall. As narrative designer on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, she served an important role in making the story of Miles Morales authentic to the Black experience. Morris is notable as well for her cross-media experience across gaming and literature showing how the times are changing – back in the 1970s, you’d do one thing and do it till you died. She also represents the desire of the games industry to tell more authentically Black stories, and the desire of Black writers to tell those stories. Her work continues as writer of Insomniac’s upcoming Wolverine game set to launch later this year!
Abubakar Salim
British actor and game designer Abubakar Salim is probably best known to gamers for his BAFTA-nominated performance as Bayek in 2016’s Assassin’s Creed Origins. His legendary turn as the last Medjay of Egypt has kept Bayek beloved 10 years later, with many fans citing him as their favorite Assassin’s Creed protagonist (excepting, of course, Ezio). In 2020, Salim used his headway into the gaming world to create his own gaming studio, Surgent Games, and in 2024 released his debut title Tales of Kenzera: Zau with EA. Tales of Kenzera was a powerful foray into Bantu culture though Salim’s examination of his own loss of connection to that culture in losing his father. The 2D metroidvania netted positive reviews and landed him a BAFTA award for Games Beyond Entertainment for bringing Bantu and Kenyan culture to a world of gamers otherwise unfamiliar with it. He followed it up with last year’s Dead Take, an FMV/first-person puzzle game hybrid starring Ben Starr and Neil Newbon, which received positive reviews as well. He has voiced prominent characters in Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, Dying Light: The Beast, and Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles as well as a live-action role in HBO’s House of the Dragon. Surgent Studios is currently at work on their next unannounced indie game!
Xalavier Nelson Jr.
Now that we’re firmly in the 2020s, we’re greeted by one of the fastest rising names in the world of indie game development: Xalavier Nelson Jr. After writing cult the classic PC “meme game” Hypnospace Outlaw while writing for PC Gamer as a games reviewer, he decided to move forward with creating his own studio. His development team Strange Scaffold Games was created with the purpose of making shorter games with ethical development conditions to prevent burnout in the games industry, and with this ethos he has crafted several hits by releasing two to three small titles every year for the past five years. All of their titles are just a few hours long at most and walk the line between absurd, funny, somber, and otherworldly; take a look at El Paso, Elsewhere, An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs, I Am Your Beast, Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator, and the Twitch streamer hit Clickolding. Nelson Jr. is proving over and over again that AAA studios have it wrong – gamers really do want shorter games made by people who are paid more to work less. Let’s hope the rest of the industry sees his success and follows suit!
This list of prominent Black game developers, artists, and engineers that have worked to build the games industry is by no means exhaustive – it is only the tip of the iceberg. From the modest beginnings of software and hardware development in the 1970s to the fast-paced (and brutal) industry it is today, gaming simply does not exist without Black creators. In recognition of Black History Month, we want to thank all the people who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into the last 50 years to create our favorite hobby.
Are there any more people you want recognized for Black History Month that have contributed to gaming? Let us know in the comments below!
