# Dave Morris (game designer)

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.

## Education

Dave Morris graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Physics from 1976 until 1979.

## Writer

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.
The following year, Morris and Oliver Johnson created the Dragon Warriors role-playing game. Dragon Warriors was an attempt at releasing a role-playing game in a series of paperback books.$^{:46}$ In a 1996 reader poll conducted by Arcane to determine the fifty most popular roleplaying games of all time, Dragon Warriors was ranked 48th. 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.$^{:307}$
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.

## Fabled Lands

In 1995, Morris and Jamie Thomson wrote the first of several adventure gamebooks in the Fabled Lands series.$^{:46}$ It received positive reviews, including 20 years later.
Although well-received, the books were published when, as Sylvio Konkol noted, "the golden age of adventure gamebooks was actually over." 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.$^{:1}$
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.$^{:3}$
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.

## Other works

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. Another horror novel, Florien, was published as an ebook in 2010. In 2008 his episodic comic strip Mirabilis began weekly publication in Random House's subscription-based magazine The DFC. Working with artist Leo Hartas, Morris founded electronic publisher Mirus Entertainment and published Mirabilis for the iPad in December 2010.
In addition to his more than seventy published books, 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.
Morris also co-authored a book on the computer gaming industry, having worked as a game designer for Eidos and Microsoft, and is a former mentor in the American Film Institute's Digital Content Lab. 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.