The games that made history, such as PacMan or Tetris, were built by a handful of people: 8 for PacMan, only 3 for Tetris. As technology moved on, as the market competed over hardware and over software, as what the public wanted and what game designers dreamed of grew, the making of a game became, in a few decades, complex work that needs a large team — large in numbers and in roles — with running costs that compare to a Hollywood film.

The development team: game designers

Compared to a film production, these are the directors: they choose the subject, invent the rules and the goals of the game and its characters, write the script and coordinate the work, and they run the whole development team. Many games today come out of several designers working together: some of them are the lead designers, the real heads of the project, the ones the other departments talk to; others are the level designers, whose job is to build the levels of the game. Some designers act as art directors, whose job is to make the artistic and architectural elements fit with the characters and the settings.

The development team: graphics programmers

In games, the graphics programmers give shape and colour to settings and characters. They build every visual side of the game, from the programming of the game world to the user interface the player deals with. The most prestigious studios employ hundreds of graphics programmers on a game, and always put general programmers beside them to help with building the game into the engine.

Other technical roles

If the game being made is an online game or has network features, people who know networks and servers come in. Others have the job of playing the game to check the minimum hardware, so that it runs on different systems with older hardware. There are roles that take care of packing the game for DVD, Blu-ray or other physical media, or of compressing it for digital distribution through an online download.

There are other roles too, professional or not: the beta testers, who, with no particular academic qualification but a good grasp of computing, play the games about to go on the market to look for bugs and faults of every kind, so that the developers can fix them.

Roles outside computing

Any game worth its name needs sound design and a soundtrack, and for that there are the sound technician and the composers. Unlike a film, a composer has to write music that can loop, in case a player takes longer to finish a section. Most game music is written by one composer, but some of it is handed to an orchestra or a band.

Of course, like any work, making games has a budget and legal rules to follow, and for those there is an accounting office and a legal one. Advertising matters too and brings its own professionals, as do physical production (printing the CDs and DVDs) and distribution around the world. Joining the publisher, the designers, the technical and commercial side and the rest of the team is always the producer: the one who manages time, money and resources to get the work finished and keeps the production standards high.