Kellee Santiago

Kellee Santiago came to games from the theater. Trained in dramatic arts at New York University before pursuing an interactive media degree at the University of Southern California, she carried into the medium a belief that games belonged in the same conversation as film, literature, and the stage, capable of moving people rather than merely entertaining them.

At USC she met the designer Jenova Chen, and together they co-founded thatgamecompany, one of the most influential independent studios of its era, with Santiago as president and producer. The studio's mission was explicit and unfashionable: to make games that evoked feelings the medium rarely reached for. Their early work Flow and the wistful Flower, in which the player is a breeze carrying petals across the landscape, built toward their masterpiece.

That masterpiece was Journey, released in 2012, a game in which a robed figure travels across a vast desert toward a distant mountain, occasionally encountering another real player online with whom no words, only chimes and gestures, can be exchanged. Wordless, brief, and profoundly emotional, it became a landmark in the argument for games as art, winning a sweep of awards and even earning a Grammy nomination for its score. Santiago's production leadership held together a famously difficult development, keeping a small team pointed at an intangible emotional goal through years of uncertainty and near-collapse.

Her influence extends well past the games she shipped. Santiago became one of the most articulate public advocates for games as an expressive medium, memorably taking the argument directly to skeptical critics who dismissed the idea that games could be art. After thatgamecompany she moved into fostering others' work, including a role helping to shape independent game curation and funding at Google, using her platform to widen the door she had helped open.

Her signature is the producer as creative conscience: the person who protects a fragile artistic vision from the pressures that would flatten it. Kellee Santiago helped prove that a game could make a grown player weep, and spent the years after making sure that was only the beginning.