ABOUT

I'm a freelance writer, narrative director and narrative designer writing for games, VR, comics, books and radio/audio. I was previously Narrative Director with Criterion Games, an Electronic Arts studio. Prior to this I was Principal Writer with Saber Interactive, where I worked on Turok: Origins (Saber forthcoming), as well as undertaking a dialogue polish for the Splatter Royale DLC for Saber's Evil Dead game (2023). Before that I was Lead Writer with Sony's much missed London Studio.

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I originally come from Poole, Dorset on the south coast of the UK (I went to Henry Harbin Secondary School, which is why the name Harbin occasionally crops up in things I write). In 1983, at the age of eleven, I became a runner-up in the Daily Express competition to Design a Home of the Future, winning an Atari 800. In a sense this prize was very much my origin story, since it sparked my early interest in video game storytelling and interactive narrative. It also heralded the first of a number of creative awards and competitions that helped fuel my career as a writer working in multiple different kinds of media.

 

In 1993, I won the BBC Young Radio Critic of the Year award in my age category and was asked to read the winning entry on BBC Radio Four's flagship arts programme Kaleidoscope. This led directly to my first byline as "Colin Harvey" for The Guardian newspaper in 1994. In 1999 my science fiction radio play script The Cost of a Year in '69 was shortlisted in the BBC First Bite Festival and a year later my television sitcom Fans -- about the eponymous followers of a familiar long running BBC science fantasy show -- was shortlisted in the BBC Talent 2000 competition. In 2006, my original short story 'The Stinker' won the first Pulp Idol award, jointly conferred by SFX Magazine and Gollancz Books. This was my first published piece of fiction, of which I remain extremely proud.

 

My published and produced work includes the video games Battlefield 6 (EA 2025), Blood and Truth (Sony 2019) and Sniper Elite 4 (Rebellion 2017), as well as tie-in material for Big Finish’s Doctor Who and Highlander ranges and short fiction for Black Library's Warhammer - Age of Sigmar. I'm the author of ‘Dead Kelly’, a novella for Abaddon Books’ Afterblight series, a Sinbad novel for the US publisher Airship 27, and comic stories for 2000AD and Commando.

 

My book Fantastic Transmedia, an analysis of large and small-scale crossmedia storytelling in science fiction and fantasy franchises, was published by Palgrave in 2015. I have a PhD exploring the relationship between story and play in video games (conferred 2009) and in March 2022 I wrote and presented 'The Origins of the Metaverse' for BBC Radio Four. In 2025, Canbury Press published my nonfiction book When Worlds Collide -- How Video Games Reinvent Storytelling, which aims to fuse the academic theory surrounding interactive narrative and game storytelling with lived industry experience. As well as my own insights, I interview lots of fellow game storytellers, from writers to narrative designers and performance directors.

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Please contact me if you'd like to see a portfolio of my published and produced work.