Joe Dever, English fantasy author (d. 2016)
Joseph Robert Dever, also known as Joe Dever (12 February 1956 – 29 November 2016) was an English fantasy author and game designer. Originally a musician, Dever became the first British winner of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Championship of America in 1982.
He first created the fictional world of Magnamund in 1977 as a setting for his Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. In 1984, he released the first book of the Lone Wolf series of young-adult gamebooks, and the series has since sold over 11.5 million copies worldwide (as of September 2014). He experienced difficulty with his publishers as the game books market began to contract in 1995, until publication ceased in 1998 before the final four books (numbers 29–32) were released. Since 2003, however, the series has enjoyed a strong revival of interest particularly in France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Poland following the re-release of the gamebook series in these countries.
From 1996 onwards, Dever had been involved in the design and production of several successful computer and console games. He also contributed to Lone Wolf: The Roleplaying Game, a Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying game for Lone Wolf published by Mongoose Publishing (UK) from 2004 to 2013 and Le Grimoire (France) in 2006–2013. In 2013, he wrote the story and in-game text for the Joe Dever's Lone Wolf video game series specifically designed for tablets and smartphones. Entitled Lone Wolf: Blood on the Snow, it was developed by Forge Reply (Milan, Italy) and published by BulkyPix. In February 2014, it won two Golden Dragon Awards from the Italian Video Game Developer's Association of Italy (AESVI) for Best Game Design and Best Indie Game of the Year 2013. In April 2014, it was a finalist in the Develop Industry Excellence Awards. On 27 November 2014, it was released via Steam for PC's and Mac computers. On 11 January 2016, the developer Forge Reply announced that Joe Dever's Lone Wolf had achieved 2.5 million downloads since its release in November 2013.
At the time of his death, Dever was authoring supplements for the Lone Wolf Adventure Game with Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd., and writing the final books in the core Lone Wolf series. Following his death, his son Ben announced that his family would work to publish the remaining three books of the saga.