Chris Avellone

Life

Chris Avellone grew up in Alexandria, Virginia. At nine, a friend playing catch described a strange game of make-believe in which you could be a dwarf or an elf, explore dungeons and take monsters' treasure. When Avellone tried to assemble a group for Dungeons & Dragons, nobody wanted to run it, so he became the Game Master himself, and learned to experience games through the pleasure of entertaining players. At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology he saw The Bard's Tale II, a sequel to Interplay's The Bard's Tale, running on a friend's Commodore 64 and realized a computer could run a game for him; he went on to play every computer RPG he could find.

He studied architecture at Virginia Tech because he loved drawing maps for his tabletop sessions, but found his sketchbooks filling with more sentences than sketches. He transferred to the College of William & Mary and graduated in English in 1994. Meanwhile he submitted adventures to Dragon, Dungeon and other publishers, collecting rejections until Hero Games asked him to write Underworld Enemies (1993) for its Dark Champions superhero line.

Work

In June 1995 an editor's recommendation brought Avellone to Interplay Productions in Irvine for an interview about a possible game in TSR's Planescape setting. He said he would "start at the death screen, and just tell the story of what happens after that," and was hired as a junior designer. While he was still working on Descent to Undermountain (1998), a troubled first-person Forgotten Realms game, he was asked by Feargus Urquhart, head of the RPG division soon named Black Isle Studios, to lead the Planescape project on BioWare's Infinity Engine.

The result was Planescape: Torment, released in December 1999. Its hero, the Nameless One, is an amnesiac immortal who wakes on a mortuary slab; death is a doorway rather than an ending, and the game's central question is "What can change the nature of a man?" Avellone deliberately overturned fantasy conventions, cited influences from Archie Comics to Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber and Shadowrun, and wrote much of its enormous script himself, including many of its companions. While writing Torment he also designed areas of Fallout 2 (1998), including New Reno, working punishing hours that his doctor later warned him against. Torment sold modestly but has since been ranked among the greatest games of all time, above all for its writing.

At Black Isle he wrote the major characters of Icewind Dale (2000), worked on its expansions and on Icewind Dale II (2002), and spent years as lead designer of Van Buren, the original Fallout 3, which never left pre-production. He left Interplay in 2003, shortly before Black Isle was shut down, and became one of the five co-founders and chief creative officer of Obsidian Entertainment. There he was lead designer of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004), wrote companions for Neverwinter Nights' sequel, led Alpha Protocol (2010) and wrote and directed much of Fallout: New Vegas's downloadable content, including Dead Money and Lonesome Road.

When crowdfunding erupted in 2012, Avellone became a Kickstarter phenomenon: campaigns for inXile's Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera promised his participation as a stretch goal, and he helped shape Obsidian's own record-breaking Pillars of Eternity, writing its companions Durance and the Grieving Mother. He left Obsidian in June 2015 and became a freelance writer and designer, contributing to Prey (2017), Larian's Divinity: Original Sin II (2017), where he created the undead companion Fane, Pathfinder: Kingmaker (2018), Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (2021).

In June 2020 Avellone was publicly accused of sexual misconduct by two people, and several studios ended their work with him. He denied the allegations and in 2021 filed a defamation suit. In March 2023 the case was settled; the two accusers issued a statement retracting their accusations, saying Avellone had never sexually abused either of them.

Legacy

Avellone's influence is felt wherever an RPG trusts players with ideas as well as swords. Planescape: Torment proved that a computer role-playing game could be literary, philosophical and strange, and it remains the benchmark to which every "writer's RPG" is compared. His companions, from Torment's cast to Kreia in Knights of the Old Republic II, set a standard for party members who argue with the player's worldview.

His career also tracks the fortunes of the Western RPG itself: the Interplay boom, the collapse of Black Isle, Obsidian's contract years and the Kickstarter revival. IGN named him among the top 100 game creators of all time in 2009. For visitors to the Collapse & Renaissance: Cards, Vampires & Baldur's Gate chapter, he is the storyteller of the Infinity Engine era.