Bent on total word domination
A professional in the gaming industry, Scott Hungerford has worked as a Storyteller, Continuity Manager, and Game Designer for major companies like Wizards of the Coast, WizKids, Sierra Online, Big Fish Games and Gazillion Entertainment for over ten years. Having initially worked as a Continuity Manager on Magic: the Gathering & Mage Knight, he’s worked as Lead Game Designer for WizKids on the Horrorclix brand, as a Game Designer for Carcassonne & Arkadian Warriors at Sierra Online, as a Designer/Producer for Big Fish Games, and as a Game Designer for Gazillion Entertainment.
On a personal note, Scott is married, owns a silly Doberhound, and likes ravens and crows a hell of a lot even to the point of having learned to talk crow (as most of them seem to know how to count). He’s been a gamer across a variety of fronts (role-playing, card, board, computer, console, dice, poker, whatever) for way too long, is obsessed with Halo, Bioshock, Gears, and Eve Online, once co-founded a five thousand member cult organization in the early 90’s. Apart from having earned his own game patent, he is working a number of brave and devious schemes that may open doorways to publishing and screenplay writing around the world.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/scotthungerford
Writing Project Status
1. Goblin Girl, YA novella = finished, in open query
2. Rudy, hardboiled urban fantasy novel = finished, in open query
3. Raven urban mythic novel = finished, in open query
4. Ferry Folk novel = finished, in open query
5. Fire Cage steampunk novel = finished, in open query
6. College by the Sea novel = first draft complete, needs polishing run
7. Paranormal romance = opening chapters in pitch format
8. Raven-based sequel = fully mapped out
9. Urban fantasy sequel = working through the second act
10. Silver, Iron and Brass = locked away in a coffin, never to return
11. Historical Screenplay & television series, currently under construction
Published Computer Game Credits List, October 2009
Marvel Super Hero Squad MMO (PC) (Game Designer) TBA
Smartycard (PC) (Game Designer) 2009
Big Sea Games (Web) (Game Designer/Producer) 2009
Carcassonne (XBLA) (Game Designer) 2007
Arkadian Warriors (XBLA) (Game Designer) 2007
Mage Knight: Apocalypse (PC) (Story Consultant) 2006
Mage Knight: Destiny’s Soldier (DS) (Story Consultant) 2006
And.. an additional handful of titles that have yet to be formally announced..!
Published Hobby Game Credits List, October 2009
Horrorclix (CMG) (Lead Designer) 2006
Horrorclix Aliens vs. Predator (CMG) (Lead Designer) 2006
Horrorclix Aliens vs. Predator, Alien Queen (CMG) (Lead Designer) 2006
Zypods (CMG) (Game Designer) 2006
Battlestar Galactica (CCG) (Game Designer) 2006
Red Juggernaut, World of Terris (Co-Story Consultant) 2006
Rocketmen: Titans (CSG) (Game Designer) 2006
Tsuro (Boardgame) (Editor / Writer) 2005
Mage Knight: Dark Riders (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2004
Mage Knight: Sorcery (CMG) (Game Designer) 2004
Mage Knight: Dragon’s Gate (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2003
Mage Knight 2.0 (CMG) (Game Designer) 2003
Mage Knight: Minions (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2003
Mage Knight: Pyramid (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2003
Mage Knight: Uprising (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2003
Mage Knight: Dungeons (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2002
Mage Knight: Sinister (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2002
Mage Knight: Conquest (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2002
Mage Knight: Whirlwind (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2001
Mage Knight: Lancers (CMG) (Continuity Manager) 2001
Magic: the Gathering – Visions (CCG) (Continuity Manager) 1997
Magic: the Gathering – Weatherlight (CCG) (Continuity Manager) 1997
Magic: the Gathering – Alliances (CCG) (Continuity Manager) 1996
Magic: the Gathering – Mirage (CCG) (Continuity Manager) 1996
Magic: the Gathering – Ice Age (CCG) (Continuity Manager) 1995
Magic: the Gathering – Homelands (CCG) (Lead Designer) 1995
Magic: the Gathering – Fallen Empires (CCG) (Continuity Manager) 1994
Continuity Credits, WizKids
(Resource) Mage Knight Collector’s Guide #1
(Resource) Mage Knight Collector’s Guide #2
(Novel) Mage Knight: Rebel Thunder
(Novel) Mage Knight: Dark Debts
(Novel) Mage Knight: Stolen Prophecy
(Novel) Mage Knight, Black Thorn Gambit
(Novel) Mage Knight, Khamsin’s Heir
(Comic) Mage Knight: Stolen Destiny (1-5, IDW)
Continuity Credits, Wizards of the Coast
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: Arena
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: Whispering Woods
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: Shattered Chains
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: Sacrifice
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: The Cursed Land
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: The Prodigal Sorcerer
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: Ashes of the Sun
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: Tapestries
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: Distant Planes
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: Song of Time
(Novel) Magic: the Gathering: And Peace Shall Sleep
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Antiquities (1-4)
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Arabian Nights (1-2)
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Convocations
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Dakkon Blackblade
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Elder Dragons (1-2)
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Fallen Angel
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Fallen Empires (1-2)
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Homelands
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Ice Age (1-4)
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Legend of Jedit Ojanen (1-2)
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Nightmare
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Serra Angel
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Shadow Mage (1-4)
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Shandalar (1-2)
(Comic) Magic: the Gathering: Wayfarer (1-5, Acclaim)
Immersive World Credits & Contributions
Mage Knight Immersive Website, WizKids, 2000-2004
Mechwarrior Immersive website, WizKids, 2001-2004
Other Game Contributions & Creations
Earth and Sky: Modern Urban Faerie Tales
Everway
Ars Magica
SLA Industries
White Wolf’s World of Darkness
White Wolf’s Live Action Role Playing lines
Magazine & Website Articles & Contributions
Duelist Magazine, Issue #7, “Strange Tales”, 1997
Duelist Magazine, Issue #8, “Eron the Relentless”, 1997
Duelist Magazine, Issue #9, “Autumn Willow”
Duelist Magazine, Issue #10, “Baron Sengir”, 1997
Duelist Magazine, Issue #11, “The Lord of Tresserhorn”, 1997
Duelist Magazine, Issue #13, “The Gnomes of Steel Island”, 1997
Duelist Magazine, Issue #14, “Serra Angel”, 1997
Duelist Magazine, Issue #15, “Goblin Recruiter”, 1997
Duelist Magazine, Issue #16, “Dominian Chronicles” , 1997
Campaign Magazine, Issue #08, “Mage Knight Bestiary”, 2003
Campaign Magazine, Issue #09, “Mage Knight Bestiary”, 2003
Web Article, Duelist Magazine Online, “The Assassin’s of Suq’Ata”, 1997
Web Article, Duelist Magazine Online, “Caught in the Web”, 1997
Web Article, Duelist Magazine Online, “Girl’s Town”, Spring 1997
Web Article, Duelist Magazine Online, “Letters from the Field”, 1997
Web Article, Duelist Magazine Online, “Sunpier”, Spring 1997
The “Weird Stuff”
Magic: the Gathering, Battlemage (PC, Acclaim) (Continuity Manager) 1997
Magic: the Gathering (PC, Microprose) (Continuity Manager) 1997
Magic: the Gathering, Armageddon (Acclaim) (Continuity Manager) 1997
Writing Sample
Scott Hungerford
Unpublished Novel Prologue
The theater lights dimmed as the curtains opened wide, revealing the empty stage beyond. A grand piano, shiny and black, sat in the middle of the space, set against a backdrop of soft red velvet. The audience quieted and grew still as a young, thin Italian-American woman walked into view, her long black hair tied back into a bun. She wore a shapeless black dress that hung to just below her knees, and carried a rosary in her right hand, the clicking beads the only sound in the waiting hush.
After whispering a silent prayer under her breath, the young performer crossed herself, then took her seat at the instrument. She carefully adjusted the bench so it sat at just the right distance from the foot pedals, then carefully ran her long fingers along the polished white keys. Once she was ready, she sat down, placed the rosary on the bench beside her, then folded her hands in her lap, lowered her head and waited.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” announced a man’s voice from beyond the curtain. “I present to you Madeline Colton of Fabresburg, New York, valedictorian of the Roost’s musical program for 1999 and recipient of the Charles Vaunt Award for Modern Composition. This evening marks Madeline’s final performance at the Roost as a student, for tomorrow evening our young prodigy starts rehearsals with the Seattle Symphony as a piano soloist. So, without further interruption, I present to you Madeline Colton and her first piece of the evening, ‘Scissors and Winding Clock’.
Madeline raised her hands above the piano’s keys, eyes unfocused, shoulders relaxed. She gently bit the edge of her bottom lip with concentration. With her right hand, she softly played a flight of high, trickling notes that echoed throughout the darkened auditorium. With her left hand she began to tap out a rhythmical beat reminiscent of a ticking clock. With the thrumming heartbeat in the background, and the high alto arpeggios just barely louder than their base counterparts, her song cupped the listener’s hearts, immersing her audience within the folds of her art.
Madeline was lost in her music almost immediately, playing from memory without any need for the reams of sheet music she had already packed away in her moving boxes. As her hands plucked out rhythm and harmony from the instrument, she knew that she had already fallen under the spell of the vibration, that she was already entranced with this simple instrument of wound metal cords and smoothed hardwood. All her life, ever since she had first played her grandmother’s piano when she was just four years old, Madeline had never lost her awe of the piano’s thrumming, demanding soul. Never had she forgotten her love and worship for the unique symbiosis between the instrument and herself, and for all the cunning glory of music and its endless complexity.
Madeline entered into the first difficult section of her piece, thinking of the last four years she had spent at the Roost. Of all of the friends she was going to have to leave behind, and of all the teachers who now favored her as a peer, as an equal, masks lowered, illusions discarded. She was looking forward to Seattle and her new task with the symphony as a soloist, but she was going to dearly miss the Roost’s rushing wind and gray waters, its crying seagulls and crumbling concrete fortifications left over from the First World War.
Amidst all of it, from the little room she’d shared with Lizzy over the last eight months, to the recital hall where she had laughed, played, cried and laughed again a hundred times over the last four years, Madeline knew she was going to miss her collegiate life very much—even more than she missed her own home and family. As she hammered out the cutting, staccato arpeggio that symbolized the wicked edge of the cutting shears, Madeline knew that after tomorrow she wouldn’t be able to ever call the Roost home ever again, and she doubted that Seattle would ever become home either.
Most of her family sat out in the darkened audience, many of them hearing her play for the first time since she had left for school. She knew that they would be proud of her, that they dreamed for her success. But she hoped, deep down inside, that they were also a little frightened of their little girl, even as she was ripping and tearing out the piano’s guts in an attempt to communicate to them her own pain and struggle. She hoped that they would feel through her music what they had made her feel for all of those years of her stolen childhood. No friends, no acquaintances. Just the endless string of tutors and her mother’s relentless desire for her to master the music, to utilize a talent that no one else in her family could even begin to match.
Now came the section of the piece Madeline called the Deep Rhythm, which was a huge complicated knot of base chords—notes so low and muddy on the perfectly tuned piano that they were almost unintelligible. After slowing the tempo down and lulling the listener for a short while, taking the time to entrance them with the complex melody intertwining through the chords, she would slowly carry that progression up to daylight. She would carry the listener up through the fog to where the sunlight shone on every imperfection, where every note, every third, every broken minor chord could be heard like Gabriel’s trumpet calling out the old dead martyrs and saints. All of this was set against the vicious backdrop of the endlessly ticking winding clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, the eternal swaying metronome that had been her family’s icon against darkness for most of the years of her childhood.
Her two older brothers had both followed her father’s passion for crime, and all three of them had been in jail off and on for most of Madeline’s life. With the men laid impotent by vice and avarice, Madeline’s mother and the rest of her family had all looked to their gifted prodigy to carry what little good was left in the family name. As her brothers had dabbled with truancy, started fights, and stole packs of cigarettes, Madeline had been steadily forced by her mother from a world where kids her own age played and investigated the world around them, into a reality where the metronome guided her every motion, whim and thought. Madeline had always loved the music, but to be practicing Chopin and Mozart instead of swimming at the Y or kicking through piles of fall leaves threatened constantly to leave her heart dark and cold. But Madeline persevered and thrived within the enclosing arms of her musical gift and her determined faith in God.
When Madeline was fourteen, the kindly Mr. Baker showed her how to escape from her life. He was the guidance counselor at her Catholic private school, the one who had told her over and over again that she had a musical gift that shouldn’t be wasted. One rainy afternoon Mr. Baker sat down across the lunch-table from Madeline, and warned her that the next few years of school could end up becoming a horror if she didn’t challenge herself. Madeline had told him that she didn’t care anymore—that nothing could be worse that what she was facing right then with her music and her family.
But the counselor advised her that if she were to apply a great deal of effort, Madeline might be able to graduate in six semesters instead of eight, as long as she was willing to work through the next two summers and to fight through an extremely challenging class load. Then, if she had good grades, she could likely go to any college in the United States of her choosing.
Seeing the light, Madeline told her mother about the options, and was delighted that her mother agreed as well. While her mother initially assumed that Madeline would go to a local New York college, Madeline had other plans, and knew that the better she did in school, the more scholarship choices she would have with which to make her escape.
Soon Madeline put on the fast track, and was immersed in a world of history and science, mathematics and French, without a single distraction from journalism, yearbook, physical education, or after-school activities. Drawn and gaunt, with dark circles under her eyes and unkempt hair, Madeline fought through her classes and excelled, knowing her escape was close, all the while keeping up her afternoon vigils with her music and Sunday mornings with God.
The competing tones from the ticking clock and discordant scissors gave way to a fleeting, cheery melody, like a trickling, reflecting brook on a bright summer day. The day Madeline left for the Roost, one of the best performing arts colleges in America, was one of the happiest days of her life. That first day while she was on her first plane ride, flying over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains below, was the first day in over eight years that the metronome hadn’t somehow guided her every step. Amidst the crying children, arguing parents, rustling newspapers and anguished stewardesses, Madeline realized for the first time that she could hear her own music deep within herself, music that thrummed from within her own heart that wasn’t confined or constrained by sheet music or impatient tutors.
Madeline didn’t sign up for any music classes her first quarter, nor did she even play piano for the first three months after her arrival at the Roost. Instead, Madeline immersed herself in every odd thing the Roost and its community had to offer. Walks on the beach, exploring the old war bunkers, learning to drive with one of her newfound friends, and even discovering the glory of boys with their short-cut hair and charmingly dishonest smiles. But eventually, as she knew it would, her old roots would claim her again. As she sat in the school library one night praying to God that she was not to be an unmarried mother at eighteen, the relentless, perfect ticking of a grandfather clock at the back of the study hall brought her back to her senses. That tick-tock heart rhythm brought her back reverence for the Music, reminded her of her own true path and showed her how very close she had been to throwing away her gift. She knew then that her true self lay not separate from the metronome, but combined the two into a sometimes discordant, but overly powerful symphony of potential.
Now Madeline came to the close of her piece, a pounding, powerful hailstorm of notes hammering beneath her fingers. It was all about the struggle to pour herself into music and school, without the luxury of just shutting out the rest of the world. A whole symphony of mixed melodies rose from the grand piano, and Madeline hunched into her playing, concentrating with her whole being on the perfection of her art. That struggle, that clawing, tearing struggle between her heart and her soul was embodied in every note, broadcasting all four years of her glorious journey through her trials to become an adult.
In the very depths of her mind Madeline could imagine twin violins sawing a bloody harmony. She could hear the rows of flutists casting notes into the maelstrom of her composition like fall leaves blown by a brisk winter wind. The slamming, pounding beat of the base drum threatened to unhinge everything if a single tremor was ignored. Within Madeline the tick-tock was all powerful now, in a duel to the death with the shearing arpeggio blades that threatened to rip the piece apart at every note, threatening discord and destruction at every hammering heart-beat. But chaos would not win today, as it had not won during her crisis of self, and Madeline’s music demanded the very essence of the blades to conform to the relentless beat, to match the scissoring stride and motion of every tick-tock chord.
Then, as if it knew it had lost, the cacophony started to fade away, blending into the key of the tick-tock rhythm of the winding clock. The slashing of the scissors slowed and stuttered, then became long striking arpeggios that matched perfect time with the metronome, sour minor notes blending into triumphant, full-bodied major chords bristling with possibility and life. Harmony blossomed, rhythm dominated, and with the last sixteen measures of Madeline’s song came joyful tears of exaltation and relief. With a steady hand she finished the notes, one after the other, the familiar arpeggio matching the last beats of the steady tempo. Then she had reached the last note, and the harmony of her work faded and echoed into an intimate silence. After a few seconds, she lifted her hands from the keys, and the crowd surged to its feet with thunderous applause.