Fergus McNeill (born in 1969) is a Scottish author and interactive entertainment developer. He has designed and created games since the early 1980s, working with companies such as CRL, Silversoft, Macmillan Group, Activision, SCi Eidos and EA. He was a founder member of TIGA and is a member of the Crime Writers' Association[1] and BAFTA. He is the author of a series of contemporary crime thrillers published by Hodder & Stoughton.
Background
McNeill, born in 1969,[2] grew up in Scotland, living in Helensburgh[3] and later in Fintry. When he was 11, his family moved to Hampshire, England, where he attended Swanmore Secondary School. Whilst there, he wrote his first games, which attracted coverage in the specialist computer press,[4] and this led to him abandoning college plans in order to pursue a full-time career in the games industry.
Career
McNeill started developing adventure games using The Quill software. Initially, these were sold by mail-order under the Delta 4 brand, before publishing deals with CRL and Silversoft brought the titles to a larger audience. This led to McNeill working with Terry Pratchett to create the first Discworld game[5] and, later on, adapting Murder off Miami by Dennis Wheatley.[6] After an affiliate label deal with Activision,[7] McNeill set up a new studio for SCi in Southampton, focusing on PC games. While there, he oversaw development on movie tie-ins including The Lawnmower Man, and scripted the award-winning Kingdom O' Magic. He also co-produced (and provided the race announcer's voice-over for) Stainless Software's controversial racing game Carmageddon.[8]
After SCi, he moved to Smoking Gun Productions, where he worked on a range of football management titles and interactive DVD games,[9] before joining InfoSpace / IOMO as studio director in 2005. Two years later, McNeill and other staff from IOMO relaunched the studio as FinBlade.[10] In 2019 he took on the role of game director at Stainless Games.
Books
In 2011, he signed a three-book deal with Hodder & Stoughton.[11]
Eye Contact (Detective Harland series #1) first published in 2012
Knife Edge (Detective Harland series #2) first published in 2013
Cut Out (Detective Harland series #3) first published in 2014
A Detective Harland novella entitled Broken Fall was released in 2015.
A standalone historical thriller, Ashes of America, was published in 2019.
The standalone crime thriller Up Close and Fatal was published in 2022.
