Ferdowsi
The man who spent thirty years writing it down.
Abolqasem Ferdowsi was a landowner from Tus, in the north-east of Iran, born around 940. He was not a court poet on a salary. He had land, and he spent it: thirty years of work on one poem, paid for out of his own pocket until there was no pocket left.
What he was doing was collecting stories that already existed and were quietly going out of the world (a few written down, most not) and setting them in verse, in Persian, at a moment when writing in Persian was a choice rather than the obvious thing to do. The Shahnameh is the reason any of it survived.
The famous line about the poem is his own, and it reads now like an understatement: he says he has built something the wind and the rain will not wear down.
In the game
A line of his is on the game's opening screen. He gets the credit before anybody else does.