Going by the sepulchral tone of Chris Avellone’s more well known projects – Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale – you’d be forgiven for expecting him to be a fairly morose fellow: liable to brood and curse at a moment’s notice. How shocked you would be, though, to meet him: aside from the forest of black hair on his head and a general sartorial predisposition towards darker hues, Avellone is softly-spoken and infallibly cheerful. He’s self-deprecating without being piteous, and sincere to a fault. And if you’re left in any doubt as to his integrity: he has nothing but the utmost respect for his mother.

“My mother is one of the strongest women alive,” he grins. “She could kick Superman’s ass. Maybe not Bizarro’s ass, because she’d probably feel sorry for his dyslexia. But we are very close, despite being at opposite ends of the United States, and I love her and my Dad very much.” Why, you might wonder, is this any of your concern? If you’re feeling a little Freudian, you might be able to tie his maternal esteem to one of his greatest strengths as a game designer: incredibly detailed, strong and believable female characters – an idea that’s more or less anathema to the bulk of the industry.

Avellone has made a career out of quiet revolutions like this. With Planescape: Torment – a serious contender for the greatest RPG of all time – he eliminated the need for player death: not just as a clever failsafe (as in System Shock 2 or, more recently, BioShock), but something wholly integrated into the story and core gameplay. In Knights Of The Old Republic II, he took the narrative formula established by BioWare and made it introspective and focused: the game revolved completely around the protagonist’s circle of companions; the villains were more or less perfunctory until the very end, when their true roles became apparent.

Since beginning his career writing Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, helming the doomed Descent To Undermountain [a 1997 RPG that brought the first fully 3D engine to AD&D] and being threatened by Fallout narrator Ron Perlman – “I set an alliteration minefield for him… he was tired” – Avellone is now known as one of the most respected games designers in his sphere.

Descent Of Man
After landing in the games industry – “mostly by default – everything else I wanted to do wasn’t as interesting to me, it gave me the best of all design worlds” – Avellone found himself at Interplay, where he was given the chance to join the Starfleet Academy development team. Following his brief stint on the space-combat-simulator simulator, he was given his first chance to lead a project, on the less-thanauspiciously- titled Descent To Undermountain. Essentially a hack ‘n’ slash RPG in the vein of Ultima Underworld, DTU was coolly received for its bugs, poor AI and rushed nature, and Avellone regrets his involvement in the project to this day.

“I inherited that project halfway through its development, and it was the first game I worked on. I will say that it had a host of problems, including its tech premise – taking the Descent combat engine and turning it into a dungeon crawl; adding gravity to an engine that wasn’t designed for it, well, that in itself was a challenge. I still regret that DTU took so much of my time that I had to turn down Tim Cain’s offer to work on Fallout.”

He soon got his chance, albeit on the sequel. After the critical drubbing Undermountain received, Avellone’s contributions to Fallout 2 – most notably the entire, Mafia-controlled city of New Reno, with its bountiful side-quests and other distractions – were warmly welcomed, even if some Fallout zealots considered them tonally out-of-step. “I’m very proud of New Reno,” Avellone says, “as I think there’s a lot of fun sandbox things to do there. I’m proud of Vault City’s design, too – I added a lot more quests there, along with little touches here and there. Overall, I think Fallout 2 is better scope-wise but poorer aesthetically. I don’t think there was a strong genre policeman overseeing Fallout 2, and it suffered for it.”

Avellone developed a special relationship with Fallout over the years, culminating in his 2002 ‘Fallout Bible’ project. He effectively took it upon himself to become custodian of the franchise, engaging in question-and-answer sessions with fans in an attempt to build the most definitive guide to everything Interplay ever created for the hallowed post-nuclear IP. When reflecting on why the first two games were such compelling experiences, he decides, “It’s because it’s a great game with some innovative mechanics that made it more of an RPG than many other RPGs at the time – and it hit in the middle of a drought, which elevated it to ‘amazing’ status. It’s much the same reason Baldur’s Gate attracted a similar fanbase.”

Little did Avellone know he was about to create a cult classic of his very own.

Sweet Torment
Around the same time Avellone was building New Reno, Interplay was given the mandate from Tactical Studies Rules to produce an RPG based on the D&D Planescape setting. With its multiple universes, geometrically impossible landscapes and shady rules on the nature of life and death, Planescape was incomprehensible unless you were well-versed in D&D lore. It was also, in Avellone’s words, “fucking amazing”.

“We had the licence and very few developers to work on it,” he recalls. “Feargus [Urquhart, Black Isle CEO] asked if I wanted to be the first to work on the PC version; I said: ‘Hell, yes.’” Avellone’s central conceit with Torment was that death, in storybased games, was a punitive waste of time, and served only to slow players down. From this, the story emerged: players were cast as The Nameless One, a hideously scarred immortal amnesiac who would remember (rather than learn) new skills by coming into contact with relics from his forgotten past.

Death – or the lack thereof – was so pivotal to Torment’s gameplay that it could even be used to the player’s advantage. Say you needed to break into a morgue: you might attempt to attack the guards outside, but a much simpler (albeit perhaps more cringeinducing) method of entry was to simply commit suicide and be carted in, cadaver-style.

Along the player’s journey of self discovery, he’d encounter talking skulls, flying cubes, celibate succubi, ‘pregnant’ alleyways and even a half-demon girl voiced by Sheena Easton. Much of the off-kilter atmosphere was derived from the Planescape setting itself. But Avellone had his own influences, too – especially concerning Torment’s decidedly eastern approach to reincarnation and consensus reality. “I had read other fantasy books that had echoed those themes and took them in different directions,” he says. “One book in particular, God Stalk by P C Hodgell, played with belief and godhood quite well. I thought that was a very strong theme to play with, and one that definitely makes a player’s own actions and character choices stronger, because you could see them causing physical changes in the environment – imagining the NPC Adahn into existence, for example.”

Compared to the straight fantasy of BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate – the game that arguably saved the RPG from commercial inertia, and shared the Infinity Engine with Torment – Avellone’s project looked bizarre. But Interplay didn’t mind. “They were too busy,” Avellone laughs. “When you’re under the radar and no one is expecting much more than a B game, it gives you a tremendous amount of freedom to see the vision through. I think it’s only a problem if it becomes an excellent title; then they want to do a sequel that promises to be an triple-A game – as the original Fallout guys found out when they took the reins of Fallout 2: suddenly everyone wanted a piece of it.”

Torment didn’t sell nearly as many copies as Baldur’s Gate or Fallout, although Avellone is keen to note that it did make a profit. “If I had to break down the potential reasons for its numbers, though,” he considers, “I’d say, one, it was an unfamiliar setting, which can be a turn-off for players looking for a comfortable fantasy setting. Two, marketing and box covers that helped reinforce the alien nature of the game – which probably wasn’t the best choice. And three, a very slow beginning.”

Despite this, Torment’s stature has grown since its release, and it’s now widely regarded as one of the greatest RPGs ever made. Part of the game’s charm, curiously, was its vast amount of text – dialogue regularly occupied multiple paragraphs, and it was only because the narrative was so compelling that this didn’t become a chore. It was, despite its beautiful visuals, more comparable to a work of interactive literature than interactive film – the latter being the medium to which most videogames aspire – and now that big-budget voice-over casts are par for the course in game development, it seems unlikely we’ll see something like this ever again.

As much as Avellone enjoyed his time on Torment, though, he was more than grateful to take a break and move on to lighter fare.

Read part two of our meeting with Chris Avellone here.