Chris Avellone
Chris Avellone is an American video game designer and comic book writer. He is known for his roles on a large number of video games, primarily role-playing video games, praised for their writing across his three-decade career.
Avellone joined Interplay in 1995 and was one of the designers of Fallout 2 and the lead designer of Planescape: Torment, the latter of which has been regarded as "one of the best-written and most imaginative video games ever created". After departing Interplay in 2003, he became one of the co-founders and the chief creative officer of Obsidian Entertainment, where he was the lead designer of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and a senior designer on Fallout: New Vegas. From 2012 on, he was involved with some of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter, becoming known as a "human stretch goal".
Avellone departed Obsidian in 2015 and has since worked as a freelancer for various companies on games such as Prey, Divinity: Original Sin II, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.
In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time and by Gamasutra as one of the top 20 game writers. 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 gamemaster 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
Early projects, ''Fallout 2'' and ''Planescape: Torment''
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, 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. Avellone was also one of the authors involved in the fanzine Haymaker! alongside Harlick.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 in the Planescape campaign setting, which Interplay had recently acquired the video game rights for. 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 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."
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, coming up with a story where the player character was an amnesiac immortal trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. The resulting vision document 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. All the while our programmers started digging into the Infinity Engine and learning more about how it worked so we could see if our ideas were feasible or not.
Avellone incorporated the many ideas for fantasy quests and characters he had gathered over the years into his design and sought to turn fantasy conventions upside down. Around this time, Tim Cain also offered Avellone a role on Fallout as a designer, but Avellone had to turn him down because, between Last Rites and his continued responsibilities on Undermountain, he was already overburdened with work, and he recommended Scott Bennie for the role instead.
At the beginning of 1997, Avellone asked Urquhart to be transferred to full-time work on Last Rites because he no longer felt there was much he could contribute to Undermountain given that game's development troubles, but this request was only granted in the summer of that year. When Colin McComb was assigned to Last Rites as its second designer in April 1997, he found that Avellone already had a broad outline of the entire game from start to finish, with all of the major characters sketched out. It was soon realized that the name Last Rites was already trademarked and being used for another company's game, which led to their project being renamed into Planescape: Torment after many other possible names for it were rejected. Throughout that period, Avellone also contributed writing to Interplay's racing combat game Red Asphalt and Treyarch's swordfighting action-adventure game Die by the Sword, both of them released in early 1998.
Undermountain was finally released in January 1998 and sold poorly and was widely panned by critics. That same month, Fallout's central creative trio of Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson decided to leave Interplay and start their own company which they named Troika Games. This created an uncertain future for Fallout 2, which they had been leading development on for a few months, so designers, programmers and artists were taken from other projects and assigned to help with it. This included Avellone, who became an area designer on the game and designed New Reno, Vault City, the raider caves and the game's various special encounters. His work on New Reno is how Avellone "first came to people's attention", as it has been called "one of the most beloved locations in any RPG" and "possibly Avellone's single greatest creation emblematic of everything a true RPG should be: non-linear, dynamic, detailed, and expertly written". Fallout 2 was released in October 1998 and has been ranked by video game publications as one of the best RPGs of all time, though Avellone has expressed misgivings about the game's tonal inconsistencies and overuse of breaking the fourth wall.
While working on Fallout 2, he also continued writing the story and dialogue for Torment, which led to him having 160 hour workweeks that kept him exhausted. Once Fallout 2 was finished, he immediately had to enter crunch time again on Torment as the game's development team expanded from the 10 people it had at that point to between 35 and 40 by the end. McComb would later estimate that, although there were seven other designers on his team, Avellone did approximately half of the design work on the project. However, as the game's localization costs mounted due to its long script and quality assurance testers regarded it as the strangest game they had worked on, Avellone thought that Torment would be poorly received at large and was afraid he was going to be fired. When Torment was released in December 1999, it instead sold moderately well and received very positive reviews. It has since become regarded as one of the greatest video games of all time and has been especially praised for reaching a quality of writing that had not existed in games up to that point.
By the end of the game's development, Avellone's health had declined significantly from the long hours and he was advised by his doctor to not continue down that path. Interplay's vice president Trish Wright also became concerned and helped reduce his workload. When Urquhart and Donley asked him if he was willing to work on a sequel to Torment, Avellone declined, saying he was too tired.