Robert A. (“Bob”) Bates (1953- ) is an award-winning American game designer, producer, studio head, and author.

Bates grew up in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, graduating from high school in Hyattsville, Maryland in 1971. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy degree from Georgetown University in 1975. After college, he worked as a tour guide in D.C., later founding his own company, Potomac Tours. Bates, also an aspiring writer, began playing the Infocom interactive fiction game Zork and saw the format as a way to pursue a writing career by making games. He and friend David Wilt established Challenge, Inc. in 1986 with the goal of creating interactive fiction games built on the Infocom engine, Z-machine. Infocom and Challenge reached a development deal: Bates would design and write games, and the publishing and marketing would be done by Infocom. His first two published games were Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels (1987) and Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur (1989). When Activision shut down the Infocom brand in 1989, Challenge also closed its doors.

Soon after, Bates and Mike Verdu co-founded development studio Legend Entertainment Company, headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia. Legend initially recruited former colleagues from Infocom to program and develop interactive fiction games, and later retained an outside team to develop a new text parser as the engine for Legend’s games. Hit products from Legend included the Spellcasting series (1990-1992) designed by Steve Meretzky, Timequest (1991), and Eric the Unready (1993). Legend also secured licensing deals from traditional publishing houses and shifted from the floppy disk to CD-ROM technology. Their final adventure game release was John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles (1998) prior to acquisition of Legend by publisher GT Interactive (later, Infogrames).

Bates left Legend in 2004 to design, write, and produce computer and video games as an independent consultant. He also worked as the Chief Creative Officer for External Developers at Zynga from 2010-2014 before returning to consulting and developing. During his career, Bates has written, designed, or produced more than 40 games. He has twice been Chairperson of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and has received various awards throughout his career. As of 2022, Bates continues to write games as well as novels.