QUICK FACTS
Current Playing:
Gris
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
Still Wakes the Deep
Late-in-life Dungeons & Dragons fan (DM-ing essentially served as a cheap-but-effective crash course in narrative design)
UK comedy enthusiast (tumbled down a James Acaster rabbit hole on YouTube a few years back and long story short—Taskmaster is my happy place)
Questionable nerd cred (despite my love of SFF, I’m the guy who doesn’t like the classics—at least, doesn’t venerate them)
I came out of my mother via c-section ass-first, and in the process, the obstetrician nicked one of my cheeks with his scalpel. That's my story. At least, that's how my mother tells it. Not quite as epic as Copperfield I'll grant you, but undeniably on brand for me.
Already an avid gamer by five, it wasn’t until the fourth grade that I got my first taste of role-playing games, when a friend was kind enough to send me home with a busted copy of Shining Force II. I didn’t think the cartridge’s inability to hold a save state would be a hindrance, however, so my brother and I took alternating shifts throughout the day for an entire summer trying to beat the game in one sitting—never realizing that there are more hours in Shining Force II than in a day. Whoops.
The upside to this self-induced grind was that it grew into an obsession with story-driven games, which in turn sparked a love for storytelling in general.
Decades later, video games and storytelling remain the most consistent passions of my life. I initially pursued a career as games journalist thinking my best professional was writing about video games. Then one day I realized I could be writing for video games, and, well—here we are.
So far in my career, I’ve punched up the English localization of 300-year-old dragons who look suspiciously like human tweens for Japanese RPGs, championed the absence of heavy narrative in favor of somber minimalism for an upcoming sci-fi metroidvania, and channeled my inner Shane Black writing for Call of Duty.
Right now, I’m looking for the Next Big Thing.