Chris Avellone
Chris Avellone | |
|---|---|
 Avellone in 2009
| |
| Born | |
| Known for | Writing and designing role-playing video games |
Chris Avellone is an American video game designer and comic book writer. He worked for Interplay and Obsidian Entertainment before working as a freelancer. He is best known for his work on role-playing video games such as Planescape: Torment and the Fallout series.
In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.
Early life
Avellone grew up in Alexandria, Virginia and attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in nearby Fairfax County. He then moved south and studied architecture at Virginia Tech for two years until he realized his "sketchbook was often filled with more sentences than sketches", which led to him transferring to the College of William & Mary and switching over to English as his major, graduating in 1994.
His first job 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 as a campus center supervisor.
Career
Game design
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.
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 Entertainment's Dragonplay division. At the beginning of June 1995, Avellone flew to Irvine, California and interviewed with O'Green, who asked him difficult 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."
While working on Descent to 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, as well as writing for 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. He was also invited to work on Fallout as an area designer by Tim Cain, but had to turn him down because he was already overloaded with work.
In 1997 he took over the development of Descent to Undermountain, which he later called a disappointment. Avellone contributed to the 1998 game Fallout 2 and continued to work on its franchise.
Avellone led development on Planescape: Torment, which was released in 1999 and is frequently cited as among the best-written games in history.
Avellone worked on all the games of the Icewind Dale series, which were released from 2000 to 2002. As a designer, Avellone contributed to the fantasy titles Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (2001), Champions of Norrath (2004) and led the design of the canceled Fallout title Van Buren, after which he resigned from Interplay and co-founded Obsidian Entertainment. For the company, Avellone worked on the role-playing games Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II (2004) and Neverwinter Nights 2 (2006) and on the action role-playing game Alpha Protocol. He also worked as a senior designer on Fallout: New Vegas.
He worked as the project director and lead creative designer on Dead Money, Old World Blues and Lonesome Road Fallout: New Vegas downloadable content. Avellone worked as a narrative designer on Pillars of Eternity prior to leaving Obsidian Entertainment in June 2015. Avellone has since worked as a freelancer on games such as Pillars of Eternity, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Prey, Divinity: Original Sin II, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Into the Breach.
Sexual misconduct accusations and subsequent retraction
In June 2020, Avellone was accused by two people of using his status for sexual misconduct and harassment towards women during industry conventions. Following these allegations, Techland announced that they and Avellone agreed to end his work on Dying Light 2. Gato Studios also removed Avellone from The Waylanders; according to lead writer Emily Grace Buck, Avellone had "very little writing" over that project, having only penned a few quests that they planned to rewrite. Paradox Interactive said that while Avellone had worked on an early version of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, much of his work had since been overwritten.
Avellone published a denial of the allegations through Medium in June 2021 and stated he had filed a libel suit against two accusers in a California court. This libel suit was settled in March 2023, with a settlement that "provides for a seven-figure payment" from the accusers to Avellone. Concurrently the two accusers retracted their original accusations, stating that "Mr. Avellone never sexually abused either of us," and that "We have no knowledge that he has ever sexually abused any women." They also claimed in the same statement that their previous public statements with regards to Avellone had been "misinterpreted".
Works
Video games
| Year | Title | Role(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Conquest of the New World | Designer |
| 1997 | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | Additional mission design |
| 1998 | Descent to Undermountain |
|
| Fallout 2 | Designer | |
| 1999 | Planescape: Torment |
|
| 2000 | Icewind Dale | Designer |
| 2001 | Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter | Designer |
| Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance | Senior designer | |
| 2002 | Icewind Dale II | Designer |
| 2004 | Champions of Norrath |
|
| Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II |
|
|
| 2006 | Neverwinter Nights 2 | Senior designer |
| 2007 | Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer | Senior designer |
| 2010 | Alpha Protocol |
|
| Fallout: New Vegas |
|
|
| 2014 | FTL: Advanced Edition | Writer |
| Wasteland 2 | Level design | |
| 2015 | Pillars of Eternity | Writer |
| 2016 | Tyranny | Original world and story design |
| 2017 | Torment: Tides of Numenera | Writer |
| Prey | Writer | |
| Divinity: Original Sin II | Additional narrative designer | |
| 2018 | Into the Breach | Writer |
| Pathfinder: Kingmaker | Narrative designer | |
| Omensight | Writer | |
| 2019 | Degrees of Separation | Writer |
| Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order | Writer | |
| 2021 | Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous | Narrative designer |
| 2022 | Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms |
|
| TBA | Burden of Command | Advisor |
Comic books
Star Wars comics:
- Unseen, Unheard (2005)
- Heroes on Both Sides (2006)
- Impregnable (2007)
- Old Scores (2007)
- Graduation Day (2007)
Fallout comics:
- Fallout: New Vegas, All Roads (2010, part of the Fallout: New Vegas collector's edition)
Fiction
- The House of Wael (2016, to Pillars of Eternity Kickstarter backers)
Tabletop role-playing game modules
- The Puzzle Box (2020, to Pathfinder: Kingmaker Kickstarter backers)
- Dystopia (1994, Champions module published by Atlas Games)