Dave Morris | |
---|---|
Born | David John Morris 19 March 1957 Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom |
Alma mater | Magdalen College, Oxford |
Genre | Graphic novels, video games, science fiction, fantasy |
Spouse | Roz Morris |
Website | |
mirabilis-yearofwonders |
David John Morris (born 19 March 1957) is a British author of gamebooks, novels and comics and a designer of computer games and role-playing games.
Dave Morris graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, [1] where he read Physics from 1976 until 1979.
Morris began his writing career in 1984 by writing the fantasy adventure gamebook Crypt of the Vampire, part of the Golden Dragon series published by Grafton Books in the UK and Berkley Books in the US. [ citation needed ]
The following year, Morris and Oliver Johnson created the Dragon Warriors role-playing game. [2] Dragon Warriors was an attempt at releasing a role-playing game in a series of paperback books. [3] : 46 In a 1996 reader poll conducted by Arcane to determine the fifty most popular roleplaying games of all time, Dragon Warriors was ranked 48th. [4] In 2008, the game was licensed by Morris to James Wallis of Magnum Opus Press, and Serpent King Games acquired the Dragon Warriors license afterwards. [3] : 307
In 1987, Morris and Johnson created the Blood Sword series, five adventure gamebooks published by Knight Books.
In 1990, Morris and Jamie Thomson wrote The Keep of the Lich-Lord for the popular Fighting Fantasy series of adventure gamebooks.
In 1995, Morris and Jamie Thomson wrote the first of several adventure gamebooks in the Fabled Lands series. [3] : 46 It received positive reviews, including 20 years later. [5]
Although well-received, the books were published when, as Sylvio Konkol noted, "the golden age of adventure gamebooks was actually over." [6] Morris and Thomson originally envisioned twelve books in the series, but various publishing problems, including underpricing the expensive books and a shrinking market, meant the series was curtailed after only six volumes. [7] : 1
As Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) became popular in the early 2000s, Morris and Thomson hired the French firm Eidos to convert their books into an MMO. However, Eidos ran out of money before the project was completed. [7] : 3
Twenty-five years after the Fabled Lands books were published, Morris and Thomson granted a license to Prime Games to develop a Fabled Lands computer role-playing game. [8] [ better source needed ]
Morris also co-authored a number of other books, including Virtual Reality: Necklace of Skulls with Mark Smith (1993), Blood Sword: The Battlepits of Krarth with Oliver Johnson (1987), the Golden Dragon series, and a number of TV and movie novelisations.
His original novels include Knightmare (a historical fantasy adventure series set in the early 13th century that ties in with the television series of that name), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the contemporary horror novel Lost Souls.[ citation needed ] Another horror novel, Florien, was published as an ebook in 2010. [9] In 2008 his episodic comic strip Mirabilis [10] began weekly publication in Random House's subscription-based magazine The DFC. [11] Working with artist Leo Hartas, Morris founded electronic publisher Mirus Entertainment and published Mirabilis for the iPad in December 2010. [12]
In addition to his more than seventy published books, [13] Morris is a leading developer of the Empire of the Petal Throne gaming system (created by MAR Barker and published by TSR), creating a playable rules system (Tirikelu) and editing a fanzine. [14]
Morris also co-authored a book on the computer gaming industry, [15] having worked as a game designer for Eidos and Microsoft, and is a former mentor in the American Film Institute's Digital Content Lab. [16] In April 2012, he published an interactive reworking of Frankenstein in which the reader is able to give advice to the first-person narrator of the story. [17]
Dave Morris's published works include:
Robert Harbin was a British magician and author. He is noted as the inventor of a number of classic illusions, including the Zig Zag Girl. He also became an authority on origami.
A gamebook is a work of printed fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices. The narrative branches along various paths, typically through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages. Each narrative typically does not follow paragraphs in a linear or ordered fashion. Gamebooks are sometimes called choose your own adventure books or CYOA after the influential Choose Your Own Adventure series originally published by US company Bantam Books. Gamebooks influenced hypertext fiction.
Norah Lofts, néeNorah Ethel Robinson, was a 20th-century British writer. She also wrote under the pen names Peter Curtis and Juliet Astley. She wrote more than fifty books specialising in historical fiction, but she also wrote some mysteries, short stories and non-fiction. Many of her novels, including her Suffolk Trilogy, follow the history of specific houses and their residents over several generations.
Fabled Lands is a series of fantasy gamebooks written by established gamebook authors Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson and published by Pan Books, a division of Macmillan in the mid 1990s. Cover art was by Kevin Jenkins with Russ Nicholson and Arun Pottier providing maps and illustrations.
The Way of the Tiger is a series of adventure gamebooks by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson, originally published by Knight Books from 1985. They are set on the fantasy world of Orb. The reader takes the part of a young monk/ninja, named Avenger, initially on a quest to avenge his foster father's murder and recover stolen scrolls. Later books presented other challenges for Avenger to overcome, most notably taking over and ruling a city.
Russ Nicholson was a British illustrator, best known for his black and white fantasy art.
Rebecca Levene is a British author and editor. She is the author of The Hollow Gods fantasy novel series. In the 1990s, she was an editor at Virgin Books, including notably of the New Adventures series.
Buffalo Castle is a gamebook first published by Flying Buffalo in 1976 (ISBN 0-940244-01-2). Using the Tunnels & Trolls role-playing system, Buffalo Castle consists of 150 paragraphs in A4 format.
Dragon Warriors is a fantasy role playing game (RPG) system written by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson and published by Corgi Books in 1985 and 1986. In 2009, it was re-collected in a new hardcover edition by Mongoose Publishing. This print run included the publication of several supplements to the Dragon Warrior's world "Legend". However, as of September 2010, this publication run had been discontinued but the books continue to remain available in PDF format.
James Michael Ward is an American game designer and fantasy author who worked for TSR, Inc. for more than 20 years.
Jacqueline Bryony Lucy ‘Jackie’ Pullinger, MBE is a British Protestant Christian charismatic missionary to Hong Kong and founder of the St Stephen's Society. She has been ministering in Hong Kong since 1966. The early years of her Hong Kong ministry are chronicled in the book Chasing the Dragon (1980).
Marc Gascoigne is a British author and editor.
Jamie Thomson is a British writer, editor and game developer, and winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2012.
Virtual Reality was the name of a series of six gamebooks released in 1993 and 1994. Four of the books were written by Dave Morris, and two by Mark Smith.
Philip John Purser was a British television critic and novelist.
James Wallis is a British designer and publisher of tabletop and role-playing games.
Dungeons & Dragons novels are works of fantasy fiction that are based upon campaign settings released for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.
Sir Sidney Harold Evans, 1st Baronet, CMG, OBE was a British journalist and civil servant who served as Downing Street Press Secretary to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan between 1957 and 1963.