Chris Hepler

Background

About Chris Hepler

I've been writing and designing the narratives of video games for 15 years; I've written everything from MMOs and Battle Royales to single-player RPGs to Hidden Object mobile games and a voice game for the Amazon Echo. Along the way, I've delivered franchise-expanding products like alternate reality marketing games, lore books, art books, and graphic novels, while writing short fiction and an original novel of my own. I bring up franchises because I've worked with some pretty big names: Star Wars: The Old Republic, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Mass Effect trilogy are the three you've probably heard of. I am most proud of my work on Mass Effect, because I was the resident loremaster for the writing team. When the combat team needed to know "how can you make a plasma shotgun scientifically plausible?" my response couldn't be "sorry, buddy, throw out your work," so I hunted down experts and hypothesized with them until I had the answers. I contributed to nearly all aspects of writing on Mass Effect at one time or another: plotting and dialogue to be sure, but also the minutiae of the codex entries, marketing sell text, fake news stories, weapon descriptions, and two galaxy maps.("What's a galaxy map?" you ask? It's a feature with 350 or more planets that all needed interesting tidbits written about them, so while you were flying around the Milky Way, you weren't just staring at a boring stat list telling you the distance from their star calculated in astronomical units.) My experience, however, is not limited to science fiction and fantasy. At one point or another, I have worked with whatever genre or format you're thinking of - straight drama, horror, romance, comedy, and the kitchen sink. One thing I heard early in my career was "you have to know the rules before you can break them," and that has fueled my interests in storytelling, world mythology, military history, animal biology, and multidisciplinary science writing (think "Guns, Germs, and Steel"). I'm interested in how human beings tick, and the various ways their day-to-day existences can be up-ended in stories with pathos, terror, or sometimes just a little humor. Outside of my job, I enjoy martial arts, Chinese dragon boating, and I've recently tried writing comedic superhero short fiction in an original universe. Give me a call sometime and we'll talk about what I can do for your team of like-minded professionals.