Eric and Toby Fox were literal heroes to me, they introduced the idea to me that someone could create a video game on their own. I grew away from video games, but I probably wouldn't have learnt programming without them
The Cave Story guy was this for me growing up :) I made many, many game engines and then got to the content creation part and usually got stuck. If nothing else, it gave me a ton of experience programming, which I then built a career on.