8 Biggest Unsung Heroes Working In The Video Game Industry

4. Countless Writers - Taking Cinematic Story-Telling To The Medium

Joker Arkham Origins
Warner Bros. Montreal

While there is much to be owed to the army of mo-cap artists who have helped elevate the medium towards new heights of authentic animation, nothing can come close to the authors who craft a convincing story.

Corey May and Dooma Wendschuh are two of the most prominent (yet unspoken) talents in the industry, having collaborated on countless titles in the past, including the unfairly underrated Batman: Arkham Origins with Ryan Galletta.

Along with these three, talents like Patrick Redding (now also in a position at Warner Bros. Montreal) and Susan O'Connor have all helped make some of the biggest releases of the decade what they are. It's not an easy thing to create an engaging narrative, especially in a format that is often presented in such a non-linear fashion, but these guys are able to do with tact, nuance and then some, all while avoiding dreaded cliches in the process.

Hundreds of writers are currently involved in the industry, though their contributions are often grossly underrepresented in the run-up to release day. Companies wheel out their directors, designers and animators ahead of release (and rightly so), but writers really aren't usually given as big a platform to highlight their contributions.

For an industry that has been striving for artistic recognition for decades now, placing greater emphasis on the people who have done the most to mature it, at least narratively, should really be a no-brainer.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.