Mark Overmars Mark Overmars is the owner of The Game Maker Company. He is also a full professor in Computer Science at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Here he is responsible for everything related to the game technology education programs that the university offers. For more information on his academic career see his academic website, his academic CV or his list of publications. Besides his research, Mark has always been active in writing software. In the eighties he wrote a commercial database program for the Atari ST and also a number of games. Later, for the PC, he wrote software to inspire kids. Some of his popular free programs are Drawing for Children, a drawing program for children age 3 and above, and RCX Control Center for controlling the Lego MindStorms robot. Three of his programs, Drape, a visual version of Logo, Motion Planning, a game to teach people about motion planning of robots, and a version of Tangram were published by Sherston Publishing Group in the UK under the name Professor Roberts' ICT Problem Solving Kit. Recently he wrote his first commecial iPhone/Android game Super Snake HD.

Mark's most extensive project is the GameMaker program which he has developed since 1998. With this program everybody can create computer games without the need to write a single line of code. It is downloaded over a million times each year and used worldwide for hobby, education, and to produce commercial games. Hundreds of thousands of games have been created with it, including a number of popular commercial games. Since 2007 the company YoYo Games has taken over the further development and distribution of GameMaker. Because of his work on GameMaker, in 2010 the US magazine GameDeveloper named Mark Overmars one of the 50 most influential people world-wide in game development.

In 2004 Mark founded The Game Maker Company B.V. of which he is the director. The company has further developed GameMaker and undertakes other activities to stimulate the creation of games for hobby, education and professionally. In particular a very successful book was written (The Game Maker's Apprentice) and many lectures and workshops have been given.

Since 2007 The Game Maker Company is one of the owners of YoYo Games Mark is one of the directors of YoYo Games, where he helps teams of independent developers to create commercial games with GameMaker. Since 2011 The Game Maker Company also participates in Qlvr, a company developing educational apps for tablets.