Games | Mark Silcox

Games I've Designed

Commercial Video Games

From 1998 until 2002 I supported myself (more or less) working in the video game industry as a freelance writer. The two games I contributed interactive dialogue and other material to were Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (a high fantasy RPG for the Nintendo 64) and Earth and Beyond ( a science fiction MMORPG for the PC). The former is only available on old cartridges (full playthrough here) while the latter is sadly defunct. Both gigs were ridiculously fun, though, and didn't even pay that badly.

Analog Games

I've self-published four of my own games over the past two decades, since I became faculty advisor for the Chess and Games Club at UCO and thereby acquired a captive audience to playtest my work. :)

The Enclave is a one-session GM-less tabletop RPG about isolated communities slowly getting weirder over time.
The Black Spot is a quick & dirty, beer-and-pretzels style horror storytelling game.

Dark and Stormy is a card-driven improv storytelling party game that also mixes rather well with alcohol.

And finally, Demons and Doctorates is a daft one-page occult (and academically) themed RPG based on John Harper's wonderful Lasers and Feelings.

Interactive Fiction

I'm a huge fan of interactive fiction, a lovely and neglected literary medium that was briefly commercially viable in the very earliest days of computer gaming, and that's still written by a tight amateur community of brilliant authors and programmers. My own two games are Dragonlord (co-written with Okey Ikeako), a sword-and-sorcery satire in CYOA format, and The Cave of Morpheus, an affectionate tribute to Will Crowther, the author of Colossal Cave Adventure, effectively the first narrative computer game ever.