Pete Fenlon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since October 2006.

Pete Fenlon (b. 1955) is an American Role-playing game designer and cartographer. He produces large and very detailed full-color Middle-earth maps in MERP modules.

His work can be found in:

His biography from his interview. Translated from French:

"I am a kid of the Air Force. Born in Japan, I lived in Tachikawa, Omaha (Nébraska), Washington (DC), Wiesbaden (Germany), St. Louis (Missouri), the town of Oklahoma, and Alexandria (Egypt) and Williamsburg (Virginia). After obtaining a degree in history and anthropology at the University of Virginia, I completed a doctorate at the School of William & Mary, and I arrived at the bar of the state of Virginia.

The voyage, the sport, the plays, the gardening, the films, the fine meals, to draw charts, the adventure in outside remain my principal passions. I like the competition and exploration; and I adore people of all kinds, and over all my artist and wife, Olivia Johnston.

An avid player of board games and sports, I also always liked role-playing: to tell stories, and the creation of rules. I invented stories and plays since I was a boy. When I was scout (I was an Eagle Scout), I created many nature adventures. When I took part in the gaming club while in college at the University of Virginia, I made developed military simulations; but I started to play D&D in 1974, and I focused more on roleplaying games. At the beginning, I made just stories, drawings, and charts, some that TSR proposed to buy (a misery). From 1976 (with Kurt Fischer and S. Coleman Charlton), I started to create the play which we would publish later under the name of Rolemaster.

While I was in law school at the College of William & Mary in 1980, I founded ICE with a team of players of my countryside Ground of the Medium/Rolemaster: Coleman Charlton (the large creative player), Terry Amthor (author of Spacemaster/Shadow World), Rick Britton (writer/historian), Bruce Shelley (famous in Age of Empires), Bruce Neidlinger, Kurt Fischer, Heike Kubasch, my wife, and some others. During the 20 years which followed, ICE would publish more supplements of play than any other company, except TSR. Our work would find its way in 13 languages. It was a good 20-year run that started with Arms Law and Iron Wind, included hundreds of game and book publications, and cultimated with the Middle-earth Collectible Card Game. Coleman was our principal author, but I took part in the creation of all the basic books, I drew the majority of the maps color, I directed range MERP, and I chaired the company. When we closed the doors of ICE in 2000, I had created, makes publish and especially played with innumerable plays.

In 2001, I joined Jordan Weisman, Sean Stewart, and Lee Dash (like Dan Carver and the Microsoft team) to work on a viral, cross-media mystery game to promote Dreamworks/Warner's film AI:Artificial Intelligence. The game served as a viral marketing campaign for the film by Steven Spielberg, a project begun by Stanley Kubrick. This mysterious game was tracked by players all over the world, and publications like the Guardian, Time Magazine, and New York Times, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly (and named web site of the year by Entertainment Weekly), the Association of American Publicity, and even Architecture Review. (Thank you still, Cloudmakers.)

At the end of 2001 I drew a color map for the game MageKnight, which was published by WizKids. In 2002, I joined with John Taylor, Kelton Flinn, and Al Roireau (all of EA) to form Castle Hill Studios, LLC. This was an amalgam of ex-employees of ICE and Kesmai Studios. We created entertainment and infrastructure software, most notably Omega (a suite of highly-scalable software designed to manage huge massively multi-player online offerings). We created a couple of experimental game tools for the Microsoft Corporation. In 2003, we embarked on the online game adaptation of the award-winning board game The Settlers of Catan. The project was led by Karl Roelofs. The crew included Karl Roelofs, Coleman Charlton, Ed Zavada, Alan Davies, and Ariel Butler. Following the game's publication by Microsoft, I returned to work for Mayfair Games (Skokie, Illinois).

Now, I am a Chairman and Studio Director for Mayfair Games. We are a leading social game publisher. Our many games include the English-language version of The Settlers of Catan, Tigris & Euphrates, Empire Builder, Eurorails, Bang!, Family Business, Shear Panic!, Hey! That's My Fish!, and Pillars of the Earth.

I try to remain active apart from work, especially with the Boy Scouts of America. I enjoy sports, bicycling, backpacking, kayaking, whitewater rafting, and most every sort of travel. My wife Olivia and I live in downtown Charlottesville, where we savor a pretty nice slice of life.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../p/e/t/Pete_Fenlon_03a6.html"