It's 2007. Your partner asks you why the little, evil dudes in a certain game called Overlord speak as if they were stolen from a Monty Python sketch. Your terse response—being an evil Overlord while commanding a horde of unruly minions is hard goddamn work, after all—is that someone was paid a good amount of money to make them sound that way.
But the question sticks in your mind as the in-game banter continues to amuse, so much so that you find yourself laughing out loud. As the credits roll, you make sure to note the person responsible for the quips and barbs: Rhianna Pratchett. After a quick Google search, you find that she’s the daughter of the famous Discworld author Terry Pratchett, and that she began as a gaming journalist before crossing over to write for games rather than about them.
Since her breakthrough in Overlord, Pratchett has gone on to work on some of gaming’s biggest franchises—Mirror’s Edge, Thief, Bioshock, and Tomb Raider—and even won the prestigious Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing award at the 2016 Writers Guild of America Awards for her work on Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Pratchett recently spoke with WIRED about her illustrious career so far—including her latest game, Lost Words: Beyond the Page, a narrative platformer available for PC and all major consoles right now.
This interview has been edited for both clarity and length.
WIRED: What's the first thing you remember writing? For me, it was a short Christmas story in the first or second grade.
