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Chris Avellone is an American video game designer and comic book writer. He worked for Interplay and Obsidian Entertainment before becoming a freelance designer and writer. He is best known for his work on role-playing video games such as Planescape: Torment, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and the Fallout series. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time, and in 2017, he was named by GamesTM as one of the then 50 most influential people in gaming. Early life Avellone grew up in Alexandria, Virginia. At the age of 9, he first learned about Dungeons & Dragons while playing catch with a friend from the neighborhood who started describing a "strange game of make-believe where you could pretend to be a dwarf, elf, fighter and you could explore dungeons, fight monsters, and take their treasure." After trying to put together a group to play with, he realized that no one wanted to be the group's game master and he had to learn how to fill the role himself, experiencing the game vicariously through the players and looking for new ways to entertain them. He attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in nearby Fairfax County. While in high school, he visited a friend's house and saw The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight by Interplay Productions running on the Commodore 64, which made him realize a computer game master could also run a game for him and resulted in him playing every computer RPG he could get his hands on, without considering at the time that he could seek a career in computer games. Upon finishing high school, he moved south and pursued a degree in architecture at Virginia Tech because he had enjoyed drawing maps and structures for his pen-and-paper gaming sessions. After two years, however, he realized his "sketchbook was often filled with more sentences than sketches", which made him question himself and led to him transferring to the College of William & Mary and switching over to English as his major, graduating in 1994 with a minor in fine arts as well. His first job was for a role-playing company called Day by Day Associates, and involved role-playing a criminal at the local police academy and at Hogan's Alley in Quantico, Virginia to help train police officers and FBI agents. He later worked in a toy store and as a campus center supervisor. Career 1993-2003: Tabletop games and Interplay Avellone's hobby of gamemastering for tabletop roleplaying games made him try to get his adventures and articles published. Starting in his high school years, he sent a large number of submissions to Dungeon magazine,: 1  Dragon magazine, Palladium Books, GURPS and Hero Games, but they were all rejected. However, when Hero Games had a new product line for their Champions RPG called Dark Champions and needed writers, Hero Games' line editor Bruce Harlick contacted Avellone asking him to write a character book for it, which he agreed to, resulting in 1993's Underworld Enemies. It was followed by Dystopia in 1994, Widows & Orphans in 1997 and New Bedlam Asylum in 1998, as well as contributions to the adventure anthologies Heroic Adventures Volume 1 and Volume 2 in 1996 and to Dragon, Alarums and Excursions, Adventurers Club and Shadis throughout that period. After asking Steve Peterson, his editor at Hero Games, to help him find him a job with a steady paycheck, Peterson put in a recommendation for him with Mark O'Green, the head of Interplay Productions' Dragonplay division. At the beginning of June 1995, Avellone flew to Irvine, California and interviewed with O'Green, who asked him hard questions about how he would go about designing a video game using the Planescape license, which Interplay held the video game rights for at the time. Avellone told him he would "start at the death screen, and just tell the story of what happens after that". O'Green was intrigued and hired him as a junior designer. His first task at Interplay was to design cities for a Dungeons & Dragons game set in the Forgotten Realms. When that project was cancelled a few months later, he was transferred to the role of a level designer on Descent to Undermountain, a first person 3D dungeon crawler that was also set in the Forgotten Realms and repurposed the engine used by 1995's spaceship combat game Descent. According to Avellone: "I didn't know what I was getting into! I was very happy to work on it at the time, though. They were trying to add gravity and first-person combat into the Descent engine, you know, so they could create something [like] Ultima Underworld. The engine just wasn't set up to do that, and we didn't have the sheer amount of programming power available to make that happen.": 1–2  While working on Undermountain, he was also asked to contribute writing and design to other games. The first of these to be released was Conquest of the New World, a turn-based historical strategy game developed by Quicksilver Software which was published by Interplay in 1996. Because Quicksilver were only a few streets away from Interplay, designers from Interplay including Avellone were asked to help with lore additions to the game whenever needed. He then contributed mission design to Interplay's 1997 game Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a space flight simulator that made extensive use of full motion video. By late 1996, Feargus Urquhart – who had replaced O'Green as the head of Interplay's role-playing division, soon to be known as Black Isle Studios – was being mandated to make use of the Planescape license by his superiors and became interested in making a game for it using the Infinity Engine, the isometric engine in BioWare's Baldur's Gate, which was then in development and which Interplay had access to as BioWare's publisher. Urquhart asked Avellone if he was interested in being the lead designer on the new project and Avellone agreed, seeing it as an opportunity. Avellone initially titled the game Planescape: Last Rites, and, recalling the design ideas he had shared with O'Green in his hiring interview, used them as the starting point for the game's vision document, which was warmly received by Interplay's studio head Brian Fargo, who nonetheless asked Avellone to promise he could actually deliver on it. During the game's pre-production, Avellone was given a very small team that consisted of lead programmer Dan Spitzley, lead artist Tim Donley and two other artists, sharing an office with them. As Avellone described it: Once the vision document was approved, we scaled it down and outwards and turned each bit into reality. The lead artist, Tim Donley, did sketches of each of the major locations one by one before they were arted on the computer. I then took the characters and quests and did area design documents. I wrote a first pass of much of the dialogue and companions (many of which made it all the way to the final draft). All the while our programmers started digging into the Infinity En.... Discover the Chris Monahan popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Chris Monahan books.