1. Joseph Robert Dever, known as Joe Dever was an English fantasy author and game designer.
20 Facts About Joe Dever
1. 2.
Joe Dever 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 were released.
3.
From 1996 onwards, Joe Dever had been involved in the design and production of several successful computer and console games.
4.
At the time of his death, Joe Dever was authoring supplements for the Lone Wolf Adventure Game with Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
5.
Joe Dever was born in Chingford and educated at Buckhurst Hill County High School.
6.
Joe Dever was a bass guitar player and attempted to get a record deal when playing with Essex-based band Seventh Seal.
7.
Joe Dever was an enthusiastic wargamer with an extensive collection of both 15mm and 25mm metal miniatures, of which he had painted the vast majority.
8.
Joe Dever died on 29 November 2016, following those complications.
9.
Joe Dever was seven years old when he became a fan of the comic strip "The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire" which appeared in a magazine called Look and Learn.
10.
Joe Dever built up armies of Airfix Roman soldiers and converted their spears to laser rifles long before he was introduced to fantasy.
11.
Joe Dever was first introduced to "science fantasy" in 1970 by his Grammar school English tutor.
12.
Lone Wolf was originally meant to be published as a role-playing game system for Games Workshop, before Joe Dever negotiated a better deal from Beaver Books, an imprint of Hutchinson Publishing Ltd.
13.
Joe Dever was originally contracted by this London-based publisher Hutchinson to write four books, but he had already planned for there to be twenty in the series.
14.
Joe Dever has stated that as the game books precede the novelizations chronologically, they are the "authoritative" versions.
15.
Joe Dever developed the character Grey Star, and a sub-series of four gamebooks were written by Ian Page using this principal character.
16.
In 1999, Joe Dever gave his permission for the Lone Wolf books, numbers one through twenty, to be published for free on the internet by the non-profit organization Project Aon.
17.
Joe Dever later gave his permission to publish the New Order series and The Magnamund Companion.
18.
Mongoose arranged to publish Lone Wolf through its originally intended full 32-book arc as Joe Dever wanted, as the original series had only gone through 28 books.
19.
On 1 April 2016, Joe Dever announced that he would publish the remaining Lone Wolf's books himself with his own imprint, Holmgard Press, starting with the publication of book 29 later the same month, which was finally released on 12 May 2016.
20.
On 1 November 2015, Joe Dever was awarded a plaque on the Lucca 'Walk of Fame' for his writing and games design.