Karsten Obarski
The German who wrote Ultimate Soundtracker and, without quite meaning to, invented tracker music.
Obarski composed music for Amiga games and built his own tool to do it. Ultimate Soundtracker, published in 1987 by EAS Computer Technik, set the template for everything that followed: four channels for the Amiga's Paula chip, notes in vertical rows, hexadecimal effect commands and sampled instruments from the ST-01 disks. The format stored song and samples in one file — what became MOD.
The program was commercial but no great success in the shops. It was the pirated copies and the demoscene's rewrites — first assorted SoundTracker variants, then NoiseTracker and ProTracker — that spread the format. Obarski thus ended up in the odd position of founding a genre whose practitioners mostly knew him as a name in a file header.