User:Will McDermott

Greetings to all of my fans (translation: Hi, Mom!). This is my new User Page, which will house little more than a short bio of who I am and why you should care (basically, because I help in my small way, create the game you love to play). Not much interesting will happen on this page unless you really care about how my 6th grade teacher influenced my drive to become a writer.

However, if you wish to converse with me on a more personal basis (and by personal, I mean in public, on a wiki page that people can not only read, but edit at their own whim), then visit my (also very new) user talk page, and open up a dialogue. I'm willing to talk about the published Guild Wars projects I have worked on, my own published fiction, games I like to play (a lot of WoW, actually), or even the weather in Seattle, which I generally don't mind at all.

Who I Am
I joined ArenaNet in July of 2006, smack dab in the middle of the Nightfall development cycle and pretty much had to immediately dive into text for a campaign I knew nothing about. I learned a lot about how the text flow for Guild Wars text, the story of Nightfall, and the personalities behind the quests and missions in short order (translation: I spent the first month floundering in water three feet above my head just hoping I would someday see the surface and get the chance to breathe again.

For the five years prior to moving back to the Pacific Northwest, I floundered (really no better word for it) in Buffalo, New York, as a freelance writer. While I was very productive, publishing five novels, about eight short stories, several month's worth of newspaper columns (before the startup newspaper went down), one-third of a Dungeons& Dragons source book, and a slew of online strategy articles for trading card games that nobody plays anymore, I longed to return to Seattle and get back into the gaming industry.

So, where did I come from originally? Like most people in Seattle, I emigrated from somewhere far flatter. For me, that was Indiana. I grew up in Fort Wayne, went to school at Purdue University, and spent my first ten years as an editor in the basement of the Mechanical Engineering Building. But I was a gamer and I had dreams.

Then, in 1994, my wife gave bought a new game that would change our lives. We began playing Magic: the Gathering and instantly got hooked (some might say addicted, a problem that would rear it's ugly head again years later and again lead to an incredibly opportunity). We played Magic and spent money we didn't have on Magic cards for several years. I began reading Duelist magazine around about issue 4 and began conversing online with their editors shortly thereafter. In 1997 rumors began circulating that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) was going to purchase TSR, the makers of D&D.

I wrote to my contact on the staff at the Duelist and asked if they might need more magazine editors once they had two new magazines in house (Dungeon magazine and Dragon magazine). My luck (which is somewhat legendary in my circle of friends) held true and although they didn't need editors for the new magazine, my contact was leaving the company. I flew out to Seattle for an interview and began working as a Duelist magazine editor about six weeks later.

Now, I had fulfilled one dream (working on a magazine had long been a professional goal of mine), and it was time to begin working on my bigger dream of becoming a published fiction writer. When I got a chance to write strategy books for Magic, I advanced the idea that it might make sense to produce some short fiction pieces as a way of highlighting the story behind the sets described in the strategy guides. Thus, my first published fiction appeared in the Urza's Saga strategy guides. The editors in the book department liked my work well enough to ask me to submit a story for an upcoming Magic anthology, and from there I was then tagged to write the Magic novel, Judgment, third book in the Odyssey cycle.

My career was going great. I was editor-in-chief of TopDeck (the magazine that arose from the ashes of Duelist), I ahd my first novel contract in my pocket, Pokemon was hot and that made WotC even hotter, and Christmas was on its way. Then the bottom fell out of the Pokemon boom and WotC had to start trimming. TopDeck was among the first casualties, as its popularity was primarily founded on the success of Pokemon.

Luckily (again!), my wife got a chance to follow her dream of working in the toy and game business and landed a job with Fisher-Price, which was still headquartered in the small town just outside of Buffalo where it had been formed over 75 years ago. So, we packed up and went back across the country.

But, we longed for Seattle. In only four years, it had become home to us and we wanted to return some day.

While writing books and short stories and anything else that would bring in a freelance check, I got a note from one of my best friends at WotC that I HAD to play this new game that had just come out. Well, I wasn't all that interested in another time sink (Law and Order filled that void for me quite well), but six months later, he sent us a "free" copy of World of Warcraft. Much like when we first got interested in Magic: the Gathering, my wife and I jumped into the addiction with both feet, quickly buying a second copy of the game, two new computers, and new graphics cards so we could stay up until 4 a.m. to play with our Seattle friends.

Fast forward about eighteen months, and my gaming addiction once again paid off as I now had considerable experience with MMOs right at the time when another former co-worker, who was at that time leading the writing team here at ArenaNet, was looking for a new writer. So, the opportunity presented itself to move back to Seattle, put my writing skills to work on a computer game (next in my list of dream jobs), and work with some old friends whom I hadn't seen in five years. It really wasn't that hard of a decision, and I haven't regretted it for a single moment in the last 18 months. As they say, it's great to be home. And ArenaNet is definitely my home now.

What I've Done
Below is a list of my published game and fiction credits:

Games
Guild Wars Bonus Mission Pack

Guild Wars: Eye of the North

Guild Wars Nightfall

Novels
Lasgun Wedding (a Necromunda novel)

Cardinal Crimson (a Necromunda novel)

Blood Royal (a Necromunda novel)

The Moons of Mirrodin (a Magic: the Gathering novel)

Judgment (a Magic: the Gathering novel)

Short Stories
“Meme’s Tale” (in Shadowmoor, a Magic: the Gathering anthology)

“Resurrection Man” (in Visual Journeys: A Tribute to Space Artists by Hadley Rille Books)

“On the Off-Ramp of the Inter-Galactic Superhighway” (in Golden Age SF: Tales of a Bygone Future by Hadley Rille Books)

“Adrift in the Maelstrom” (in No Longer Dreams by Lite Circle Books)

“Essence of the Dragon” (in The Dragons’ Return by Malhavoc Press)

“Child of the Street” (in Children of the Rune by Malhavoc Press)

“Ach! Hans, Run!” (in the Monsters of Magic, a Magic: the Gathering anthology)

“Journey Home” (in the Secrets of Magic, a Magic: the Gathering anthology)

“The Lady of the Mountain” (in the Myths of Magic, a Magic: the Gathering anthology)

“Phyrexian Autopsy” (in the Official Urza's Destiny Game Guide, a Magic: the Gathering strategy guide)

“Scars of the Legacy” (in the Official Urza's Legacy Game Guide, a Magic: the Gathering strategy guide)

“A Time for Remembrance” (in the Official Guide to Urza's Saga, a Magic: the Gathering strategy guide)

Links
Some other ArenaNet folks on the wiki. Check them out:
 * Bobby Stein
 * Emily Diehl
 * Linsey Murdock
 * Ryan Scott
 * John Stumme