Richard Dinnick: Never Growing Out of Wonder
Some people never really grow up.
Richard Dinnick would probably take that as a compliment.
Long before he was writing for Doctor Who, Thunderbirds Are Go!, Sea of Thieves, Sherlock Holmes and Stargate, he was a boy completely captivated by imaginary worlds.
Like so many children of the 1980s, it started with a games console.
Not just any console.
The Atari 2600.
For an entire generation it was nothing short of revolutionary. Suddenly the arcade wasn’t somewhere you visited at weekends. It was sitting beneath the television in your living room.
Space Invaders.
Pac-Man.
Empire Strikes Back.
Hours disappeared.
Then came the SEGA Mega Drive.
PlayStation.
Xbox.
Most of us eventually packed our consoles away as life became busier.
Richard simply found another way to stay inside those worlds.
Today he writes them.
His career is wonderfully difficult to explain in a single sentence.
Novelist.
Scriptwriter.
Comic writer.
Narrative designer.
World builder.
Depending on the day, he could be creating dialogue for Doctor Who, writing stories for Sea of Thieves or helping invent entirely new alien civilisations for an unreleased science-fiction game.
It sounds like several careers rolled into one.
For Richard, it all began with a school exercise book.
“I’ve still got the first novel I ever wrote,” he laughs. “I must have been about fourteen. It’s handwritten and completely dreadful.”
He pauses.
“It was about a flooded Earth where people lived on giant oil-rig structures.”
Then he smiles.
“It was probably ecological before ecology became fashionable.”
There’s something rather lovely about that.
Many children write stories.
Few never stop.
Listening to Richard talk, it’s obvious that curiosity is still his greatest strength.
When he describes working on a cancelled game called HyperSpace, he doesn’t begin with explosions or battles.
He begins with evolution.
How would an alien species develop on a planet orbiting a particular type of star?
How would living beside a wormhole affect their biology?
What language might they speak?
What culture would emerge?
These weren’t idle conversations.
They involved scientists, designers, artists and writers sitting together asking questions most of us have never even considered.
“I love that kind of world-building,” he admits. “I get completely carried away.”
I believed him.
Because you can’t fake that level of enthusiasm.
It also reminded me that the best creative people rarely lose their sense of wonder.
They simply learn how to make a living from it.
One misconception Richard was keen to dispel is the idea of the solitary writer.
We often picture authors working alone in quiet rooms, emerging months later carrying a finished manuscript.
The reality couldn’t be more different.
“Everything is collaborative,” he explains. “Whether you’re writing novels, journalism or games, there are editors, proofreaders, designers, programmers… it’s always a team effort.”
That collaboration becomes even more remarkable when you’re creating games.
Take Sea of Thieves.
Every month players receive new adventures, new dialogue, new characters, new quests and new discoveries.
Behind every update sits an enormous team discussing not only what players will do, but why they should care.
“We always ask where the heart is,” Richard explains. “Can we find the emotional connection?”
That sentence stayed with me.
Because it applies to far more than gaming.
Technology changes.
Graphics improve.
Platforms come and go.
People, however, still respond to stories.
The emotional connection remains the thing that keeps us turning pages, watching films or picking up the controller one more time.
Richard remembers a time when games barely had stories at all.
The early arcade classics didn’t need them.
Today’s players expect something entirely different.
Modern games are immersive worlds filled with characters, history and consequence.
They need mythology.
They need personality.
Most importantly…
They need heart.
Of course, none of this happens overnight.
Richard now works with Xbox Game Studios at Microsoft, where around 150 people contribute to bringing a game to life.
Writers.
Engineers.
Programmers.
Artists.
Voice directors.
Actors.
Testers.
Daily meetings.
Daily revisions.
Constant problem solving.
It struck me how similar that sounds to making a film.
Or writing a magazine.
Or producing a theatre show.
Creative work often looks effortless from the outside.
Behind the scenes it’s anything but.
Towards the end of our conversation I asked the inevitable question.
If he could work anywhere in the world, where would he choose?
His answer came without hesitation.
Disney.
Not because of the prestige.
Because of the possibilities.
Marvel.
Star Wars.
Television.
Books.
Comics.
Games.
“It would complete the magical circle,” he smiles.
I liked that phrase.
The magical circle.
Because that’s exactly what Richard seems to have created for himself.
He’s managed to build a career around everything he loved as a child.
Not many people can say that.
As we finished talking, he mentioned playing Mario Kart with his family and Myst with his wife.
Some passions, it seems, never fade.
And perhaps that’s the biggest lesson I took away from meeting him.
We spend so much of adulthood trying to become sensible.
Richard Dinnick quietly reminds us that sometimes the cleverest thing we can do is hold on to the things that made us curious in the first place.
After all…
Every great story starts with someone asking,
“What if…?”