The Eighty-One Credits

Before Scott Rogers designed a single board game, he spent two decades building video games. Eighty-one credits across fifty-eight titles. God of War. Pac-Man World. Maximo: Ghosts to Glory. Darksiders. Drawn to Life. Combined sales exceeding fifty million copies. A career most game designers would retire on.

He couldn’t get his name on the box.

That’s the structural reality of AAA video game development. Teams of hundreds. Credits scroll past in seconds. The designer who architects the combat system shares a list with the people who modeled the barrels. Rogers spent decades solving spatial puzzles, pacing combat encounters, and engineering what theme park designers call “the weenie”—the visible landmark that draws players forward through a space. He did it for Namco, Capcom, Sony, THQ, and Walt Disney Imagineering. Nobody outside the industry knew who he was.

Board games put your name on the box. That fact alone explains the crossing.