A Game of Universe

Eric Nylund, born 1964 in California, is the author of many novels including the New York Times bestselling Halo series.

Nylund never dreamed he would write anything except lab reports and scientific papers. He received his Bachelors degree in chemistry from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his Masters degree from the University of California at San Diego, and had advanced to candidacy for his PhD… and then one day he read a novel by a much cherished author. He threw the book down and said the fateful words: ""How hard could this be?""

He sequestered himself in the library and read over two hundred ""how-to write"" books and then experimentally wrote 40,000 words of a novel that was pretty bad before he backed up, started over, and tried again. The result of that ""experiment"" was the contemporary fantasy novel, Pawn's Dream.

Nylund went to the prestigious Clarion West Writers' Workshop in 1994, and then decided to leave graduate school, abandoning a stable career in science, and become a destitute writer.

After publishing more novels and becoming a successful mid-list author, he learned that the living-just-above-the-poverty-level-starving-writer thing was no longer as romantic as it had seemed a few year before. So, he got a day job at Microsoft, first at their Encarta Encyclopedia, and later hired on to Microsoft's still-young Game Studios.

In the beginning, most writers working on video games had to be content with writing game manuals and the ""read me"" files that tell you to install new drivers for your computer video card to get the game working properly, but this soon evolved into helping game developers writer better dialog, better scripts, better games, and then creating huge story arcs to help build blocker buster, billion-dollar game franchises.

As a writer and story consultant for Microsoft Game Studios, Eric Nylund has been instrumental in developing and maintaining game franchises such as Halo and Gears of War. He has helped shape the intellectual property for some of the world's best videogame developers including Bioware, Ensemble Studios, and Epic Games.