This is interesting culturally, because in the early days with less people involved in making games, I would have expected the coder to be more relevant (and to be essential in some cases, because it doesn't matter how good is a design if it can't be implemented).
Yet in Nintendo history, we know that Super Mario was designed by Miyamoto (and Tezuka too, less known?), but I don't hear much about Toshihiko Nakago of SRD that *programmed the thing*.