Hi, I’m Dan and I’m a writer who spent the last sixteen years making award-winning games.

I used to run the internationally acclaimed studio The Chinese Room, which I started back in 2012 with the composer Jessica Curry. We built a reputation for making games that were uncompromisingly creative and focused heavily on story and music. In 2018, I steered TCR through acquisition by Sumo Digital and stayed on as Studio Head and Creative Director, stepping back from the role in August 2023.

Under my direction, TCR established itself as one of the most interesting and restlessly creative game studios in the UK, winning a whole load of some of the most prestigious awards in the industry along the way. The studio now employs over 100 people and has recently released Still Wakes the Deep, a horror I created and wrote. The initial pitch for Deep went as follows: “The Thing meets Boys From The Black Stuff. On an oil rig. Oil rig sinks.” I’m pretty pleased with it. TCR are currently working on Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2. I secured the title for the studio and did all the initial concept, story and direction on it, but it’s been quite a while since I left the studio so it might well have all changed since then.

I started playing tabletop RPGs when I was ten and spent most of my teens writing my own RPG systems and homebrew expansions to existing games like Rifts and Dark Futures. I’m an old punk at heart who loves music and books and spent a few years in the wilderness of theatre doing stage management and fight choreography; got into digital and new media arts for a while, and then started TCR whilst working at the University of Portsmouth and doing a PhD on First-Person Shooters.

I’ve hoovered up most books that exist on forgotten, lost and fictional civilisations; have an unseemly curiosity about abandoned places and spaces; find walking, trespassing and mythogeography endlessly fascinating; and play far too many shooters for my own well-being.

I’m represented by Alexander Cochran at Greyhound Literary and I’m currently working on editing my debut novel whilst burrowing away in the mulch of another two.