I think Sony bend is underrated. They have made good games but The studio Kinda feels forgotten by many. They just havent had a big time to shine with and I hope Days Gone will make The studio shine (If The game delivers)

Derek Daniels. He designed a bunch of games which I enjoy a lot. His latest one was God of War which I absolutely love and still play everyday. He has also worked on the past God of War games (1, 2, & 3)

Panic Button!, without a doubt.

They have single handedly shown every AAA publisher that big franchise games CAN be released on the Switch, in full. No one in 2016/2017 thought that DOOM, Wolfenstein II, Rocket League, etc., would ever make their way onto the platform, yet here we are.

Every week that goes by, they steadily make improvements and increase performance/visuals for said games, and they're bringing over games like Mortal Kombat 11, Wolfenstein Youngblood, and DOOM Eternal in the near future with those improves.

Definitely 4A Games, or more precisely, the two founders of that studio, Oles Shishkovstov and Alexander Maximchuk. The Metro series is one of the best post-apocalyptic games that I’ve played. Not to mention that these two were former employees of GSC Game World, the same company that made the amazing STALKER series as well (It’s been confirmed that GSC Game World is reforming and making a new STALKER game, titled STALKER 2, coming in 2021).

The upcoming Metro: Exodus should be getting the same amount of hype as most triple A titles, as I know that it will be amazing and far exceed the expectations that many people have for the Metro series.

These two game designers definitely deserve more recognition for what they have done for the game’s industry.

The guys who made psychonauts. The game doesn't seem to be massively well known but but it was ridiculously well designed and extremely unique. Looking forward to the sequal 😁

If i was to say Keita Takahashi some of you might say who but this man name should be legend as he created games which are all about fun which a lot of designers dont as they only care about money. Many a fun time i had playing his games like Katamari Damacy ,We Love Katamari, Dynasty Warriors 3 and Kessen and the big reason his poppped into my mind well Katamari Damacy Reroll just came out on the Switch and my joy of gaming came back. Hail to the King....well one fo the Kings anyway.

Double Damage Games. Rebel Galaxy was awesome. Looking forward to Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

I'd say Sefton hill tbh. He worked on the Arkham series. My favorite comic based games and one highest acclaimed games of the decade and i hardly hear about him. He should be credited for his vision and love for the character to do justice to it and make such good games.

I am going to just say the developer instead of a specific designer as there are many and I don't think the info I am able to find is up to date. There is even some fan designed content as well. My choice are the designers of Warframe at Digital Extremes. There are so many different styles that all seem to mesh pretty well into the huge world that DE has created for Warframe. DE as a whole has been very underrated, in my opinion, but there is a lot to be said of the design of the game and how far it's come since it first released over 5 years ago. It's actually disorienting to me to play a slower paced game like Red Dead 2, where the color pallet is much more natural and the effects are mostly limited to lighting and shadows and then to jump into Warframe where everything is fast, filled with color and explosions, crazy powers with varying effects, and scenery that changes with every world. The Warframes, the world created around them, the story crafted to give them life, the modding system, the weapons all combine into a very deep experience that is fun on the surface but difficult to master.

The most underrated devs in my opinion are giant sparrow studios (game director Ian Dallas), yes it is a "walking simulator" lets get that out of the way... but the way the game is designed and the way the mini game portions for each story compensated the narrative just blew my mind.. it actually communicated the experience so well that i got goose bumps playing most of those story sections.. specially the fish factory one.. hats off to them!

Sierra. They primarily made adventure games when I was a kid. None of my friends had ever heard of them though, probably because pc gaming was mainstream back then. But they really revolutionized the point and click adventure genre. I don't think they get enough credit.

HIGH MOON Studios
This group has been extremely underrated after they have been relegated to work on COD titles. Transformers War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron are really good. Imagine if they were given a big budget.
It's sad that Activision has had some of the best licenses come through it's hands and never utilized any of them.

American McGee. I would absolutely love to see him finish his Alice trilogy. Alice The Madness Returns was one of the most underrated games of the PS3/360 generation.

Jason Rohrer

A great indie developer who is, in many ways, a pioneer of his craft. I have thoroughly enjoyed every game he has released since 2005. His games deal with real life issues and he has some powerful themes running through his body of work. He has enjoyed critical and commercial success on more than one occasion, but I still feel he is deserving of much more.

Acclaim Entertainment, good games.

david cage, i copy paste what i said in the previous day ahah

Mig Perez. He created numerous games on PC to include 2 Castlevania game (one level based, one metroidvania style). His details in Castlevania Lecarde Chronicles 2 blew me away. It's hands down the best Castlevania game to a come out in over 10 years. Konami even approved it to exist so long as it was free and did not make a profit. The game even features Symphony of the Night voice actors. It's truly a phenomenal game and I highly recommend everyone downloading it and playing it. I wish it was released officially on console but alas, it was a great 30hrs from start to 100%ing everything. I'll hold it in high regards as a top game of 2017. Good luck to his team in the future.

Ready At Dawn. Their technical proficiency and world building skills were unparalleled earlier in this generation. They might have missed the mark on story in The Order but everything else was super polished. I want a follow up to that game and I would like them to have an opportunity to redeem themselves.

Keiichiro Toyama. He's a bit lesser known, but he's responsible for providing me with some of my fondest gaming memories. He's made some of my favorite games since PS1, including Silent Hill, Siren, and Gravity Rush.

Tough one, but maybe Sean Murray, and actually the whole team behind No Man's Sky. Not many people have received that bad of a reception, but still insisted on working on a game tirelessly, and releasing free content and updates on a relatively steady stream.

Mediamolecule is underrated

I'm going to say Ted Price. He's known but not well enough. Maybe I just see it That way because I met him a few years ago and he is such a nice person but whenever I tell people that, they look confused as if they've no idea who I speak of.

Game Arts for Grandia, Grandia 2, Grandia Extreme, and Grandia 3. I absolutely love the Grandia series. It's one of my favorite JRPG series. Grandia 2 is one of my favorite JRPGs and favorite games of all time.

Hidetaka Suehiro or Swery65. The man really knows how to make a great story.

Arc System Works. Guilty Gear is an awesome all round fighting game in terms of music, artstyle and easy to pick up (I have a hard time mastering fighting games but Guilty Gear strikes the right balance). Dragon Ball Fighterz was also awesome

Darl Cloud 2 is most underrated game ever, that thing deserved more attention than any FF after X.

Hideaki Itsuno

Devil May Cry 5 director. Many have tried the games of the series and have given credit. However for those that have never given in to giving the series a fair chance, its under-rated. I, myself put off looking at the game for years. I regret that. I want every gamer to give it a try and I hope # "5" entry sells very well. Good luck to Hideaki Itsuno.

I'm gonna go with Shigesato Itoi. There's really no reason to expect that he would have made such an excellent game designer, but Earthbound turned out to be an absolutely incredible trilogy. There's really nothing like it in the video game industry today. A lot of people talk about the series, but his name is rarely brought up. His games are regarded very highly but I think he personally deserves a lot more credit for them.

I would say Insomniac,but after they released Spider-man everyone loves em.
So,Arkane Studios is the answer for me...All of their games have been pretty good,especially the gameplay is superb, but they have not been selling enough.

Id have to say Falcom, the makers of the trails and Ys series. Not sure who the individuals are for making these great games happen but man are they underrated. People will say their games look terrible but I find them great for how small the company is and I always take interest in the character designs although the environments arent amazing, they look good imo.

Pandemic Studios. They are unfortunately closed, but they had some great games that were overlooked. My favorite was The Sabateur, which took place during WWII in a Nazi occupied France. Your character got the chance to run along Paris and the French countryside causing havoc for the Nazis in a GTA kind of game.

Other notable titles included Star Wars Battlefront, Mercenaries, and Destroy All Humans that come to mind. Their logo was cool too with the gas mask. It would have been cool to see what they would have come up with if they were still around.

Bloober team, for layers of fear. Probably one of last years greatest hits in my opinion. I could not put it down. Very rarely dose that happen.

4A Games - Metro is always so well done and it just seems like they don't get much credit for how polished they are.

Obsidian by far. Some ppl still think that New Vegas was made by Bethesda lol.

Toshihiro Nagoshi Hands down, In my opinion he has made the best open world games the industry has to offer. The Yakuza games are brilliant with how much they varied content they put into those small maps.

Akihiro Hino, the creator of Dark Cloud, Proffesor Layton, Rouge Galaxy and director of Dragon Quest 8,9 and writer of both Ni Nu Kuni games and helped in directing Ni Nu Kuni 2.

He is brilliant guy that keeps presenting best JRPGs ever, but westren journalists keeps ignore him to cover up SE, Activision, EA and Bathesda latests craps.

Ed McMillen. The Binding of Isaac is GotG for me. Thousands of hours of play and still going after years.

Someone else already called it, but I feel the games of Oles Shishkovstov and Alexander Maximchuk have been massively underrated. The Metro series’s such a great story, setting, charecters and gameplay. Definitely up there anomg my linear story driven fps games.

I'd say Ken Rolston. Worked on a bunch of Elder Scrolls and Kingdoms of Amalur. The games were well received, but no one knows who he is 🤔

Alright lucky 13, here we go.
I don't know a lot of about the industry when it comes to developer's names. However, George Kamitani is one name I'll always remember. At the helm of VanillaWare, everything he creates is a feast for the eyes. Beautiful 2d games with complex art design.
Congrats to Chris092

Sony Bend in my opinion

Andrew Prokhorov. One of the designers behind Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. Loved his work and I hope he is involved in another Stalker title in the near future.

Housemarque Games. The old one. Not the new battle royale spitter.

I would have to say Panic Button :) love what they are doing with the Switch but I feel they should be given a chance at creating something of their own and I feel some of their ports don't get the recognition they deserve because they come so late after initial game release on other platforms and well they are wizards with the Switch's lower specs but yeah ... Those specs are lower nonetheless...

Jason Vince and Frank Zampella. They are the founders of Respawn Entertainment that has brought us my favorite game of this gen Titanfall 2. Before that they had founded Infinity Ward-which brought us COD (the 1st one) specially notably Modern Warfare 1 & 2. Yet before even that it was Medal of Honor Allied Assult.
These guys have pretty much brought on a lot of creativity and mainstream success to video games. Most notably FPS.

Takashi Hasegawa. He worked on Tales of Symphonia which was a great RPG but hasn’t really had a chance to shine since. I believe if the Tales (series) focuses their core team a little the time some of their later entries could have done even better but they always appear to be changing their leads which makes some games more rocky from the start.

Everyone that worked on Rune Factory games at Neverland. They brought us cult classics better than any harvest moon and definitely better than stardew valley. Here's hoping Marvelous revives the series with Hashimoto.

Julian Gollop.

I’ve gotta go with Ready at Dawn. I adored Until Dawn, and I really wanted a sequel, though not a direct sequel. I’m really looking forward to that anthology they are opening on. Hopefully it is similar in quality to Until Dawn.

I was going to say Erik Wolpaw aswell for the exact same reasons...spooky.

Roll7

Olliolli, Olliolli2 and Not a Hero are games that shows that.

Dean Dodrill

American McGee! Alice was one of the most memorable game experiences that I have ever had. The sales and recognition didn't match the quality of the game.

I loved monolith production's stuff before the shadow of war games (still great games, and obviously the nemesis system is another example of their crazy creativity). They're ideas on how an fps should play were unparalleled in regards to fear and the condemned games. I would love to see them revisit that sometime! and I don't think they get enough merit for what they have done

4A Games, highly underrated. really good game, but somehow they are ignored.

There's quite a few but 4A doesn't get their full due. Oles was a programmer on S.T.A.L.K.E.R and then he and Alexander go and found 4A and develop Metro 2033 and that game had so much atmosphere and was just plain frightening at times! Great design choices all around and Last Light was another great game and showed what they could do with story. Now with Exodus looming and with it looking like a modern day marriage or Shadow of Chernobyl and Metro I believe they will pick up even more fans.

I would say in almost every game successful there are people who are not celebrated since majority of the praise will go to the main man/ company behind the game. So, I raise my hat for all those who are working in the shadows to make us experiences like nothing we experienced before.

shadow hearts designer

I am going to go back a bit and say Robert and Roberta Williams. They not only founded Sierra which gave us many; many great games but also brought us the Graphic Adventure games which in turn went from Mystery House, Mission Asteroid etc to Kings Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. They in turn influenced Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, etc.

thunder lotus games are my top pick for being underrated. More people should buy their games. Sundered was on sale earlier and it was an awesome buy

I would say creative assembly. I know you are talking about individuals but creative assembly has made some highly underappreciated games.

Guerilla games. Horizon did some amazing things...my favorite bring the amount of objects tethered to each machine. You literally can peel their skin and parts off.

Hideo Kojima.

Ready At Dawn.
Collectively speaking, that crew behind The Order 1886 has some real potential. It was a technical masterpiece that got lambasted for doing something ambitiously different of which no one really understood.

It’s a lot, but I’ll say Hideaki Itsuno too. He probably has the best (if not top 3) understanding on how to craft straight up hack and slash/action gameplay mechanics to me. Very precise and very creative.

Brian Fargo, he is the father of fallout, and the wasteland series. The wasteland series severely slept on, and they are well design. If you play wasteland 2 you'll realize how very similar it feels to the main fallout games isometric and 3rd/1st person. And on top of that he makes other critically acclaimed RPGs

Kaname Fujioka. His work on MH Tri and MGS Peace Walker deserves a nod for capturing the right atmostphere and tone given the limited hardware for worlds that no doubt feels memorable.

Ken Levine and his work in Bioshock never seems to be mentioned anymore

Gonna go with Sony Bend, a lot of people on another form say that Days Gone is going to fail/flop because they haven't released a fully fledged console game for a long time following the PS2. You guys need to play most of the handheld games they made which were all very good.

My unpopular opinion would be David Cage. Yeah yeah I know he's worked on some pretty well known and liked games, however, his titles are also what you would call niche and a lot of people debate whether his games can be considered games at all. I think he's a genius writer and creates some of the best set designs in gaming. I think he gets a lot more hate than he deserves.

David Cage will always be a go-to for either over or underrated games. Definitely agree his willingness to take risks and think outside the box deserves more credit than it gets

Congrats to Chris092.

Honorable Mention: Swery65. One of the few designers with that "Japanese weirdness" aesthetic that consistently has me interested in his games. He gets a lot of credit nowadays by the community, is vocal on twitter, and all of that secondary cred; however, I don't think that's enough for what he & his team does in playing with established gameplay templates.

Honorable Mention: Jason Rohrer. One of the most prolific indie game designers since the 2000's with some fascinating game concepts. He's gotten more mainstream cred as time has gone on though. Via Wikipedia: "Rohrer became the first videogame artist to have a solo retrospective in an art museum. His exhibition, The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer, was on view at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College until June 2016.[10]"

My 1st choice: Peter Molyneux. Oh yes indeed, N4G Community. And this basis rest solely with you...well...the general 'you,' so to speak. You get the picture. Anyways, for all the Lifetime Achievement Award Honorees for something in video games there's never been someone more widely besmirched.

Take a step back for a moment. You can barely count on your two hands a game developer who's had such prolific success across so many genres (commercially and/or critically): God games (credited with help make the first ever God game), strategy games of various sub-genres, management sim, and RPG. The RPG one will be contested by some; and I understand said disagreement in respect to his hype-hawking throughout Fable's lifespan. Even so, that doesn't diminish the special type of ARPG gameplay foundation Fable carved out for itself at the time and is still emulated. It's no surprise The Witcher series found better footing utilizing this type of template over Jade Empire/KOTOR ruleset after the first entry.

Moral of the story: get some perspective on him beyond what milquetoast pundits have said, regurgitating the 'Fable Cycle' meme and expanding it to a 500-word article for the sake of getting content out. The man has paid his dues, virtually no one of note denies his more egregiously dishonest takes, nor his lesser foibles; hevertheless, that shouldn't disregard the foundation-laying he took part in across several genres.

/fin

Suckerpunch is underrated and we will be talking about ghost of tsushima like we now do about horizon zero Dawn.

Sean Murray.

Loved his Joe Danger games, and was excited about No Man's Sky. Bought it Day 1. Got the experience I expected.

Sadly, not everyone felt that way, and many people were upset with the game they bought, and their expectations not met.

I'm not going to go into who was wrong there.

I'm just going to talk about what was offered, which was an entire universe to explore, based on some smart coding. Visually, it was appealing, and it was made by a relatively small team.

It had a rocky launch, but Sean and his team has worked endless on adding new content and enhancing the experience. With free updates. I have a lot of respect for that.

I feel many folks went overboard with their downright HATE towards this guy, and the game he made, because it wasn't the experience they expected.

You may like the game, you might hate the game, but there's no denying it is a technical achievement, and its post-launch support has been extraordinary.

Ken Levine. Thief, System Shock, Bioshock, Tribes...all great. The work he has done has been largely magnificent, but he just kind of fell through the cracks.

Eric Barone for creating a love letter to my childhood.

Ready at Dawn

David Cage. His games may not be for everyone but I quite enjoy them.

Kotaro Uchikoshi, the genius behind the zero escape zeroes. His writing is amazing and his ideas for the game were incorporated perfectly in the games.

4A games

I miss Working Designs. Yeah, they were the kings of delayed release dates in that era, but they put a lot of love into their stuff.

Whoever made Until Dawn. That game was amazing. I hope they make another similar game.

Falcom!!

They've put out an insane amount of cool and famous titles under the radar. They've gained much more traction with the trials series, but they still remember to put an insane amount of character and stories into their games.

Also my other nod is SNK

With an insane amount if fighting games under their belt. Their soundtracks are beyond incredible. They made fighting games unique and cool with the different play modes and styles. They've fought tooth and nail to be be reborn from the ashes not once but two times. Very humble passionate group.

Playdead studios is underrated.

Nate Fox. Sucker Punch is on the verge of creating their third hit franchise and it feels like they are in a somewhat similar position to Guerrilla when they were about to drop HZD. An excellent studio putting in great work for years but not quite receiving the recognition they deserve. Perhaps Tsushima will be their Horizon and people will put them up there with the top studios? With Nate at the helm Sucker Punch has been among the most consistent studios and Ghost of Tsushima could be their breakout.