Interview with Gary Cooper (the Omegaverse series)

Author of the famous Omegaverse series G.R. Cooper is a twenty year veteran of the game industry, mostly spent in the trenches of massively multi-player online game development. He's done a little of everything; producing, level design, AI scripting, community management, customer support - even a little 3D modeling - but he considers himself a game designer at heart. 

MDB: Why gaming? What prompted you to dream up a virtual world? 

GC: It's been one of my jobs for the past twenty years. I started work at one of the pioneers in online gaming, Kesmai Studios, in 1995 because I was so involved in the "virtual" worlds of the era and knew deep down that it was the beginning of something big. My career almost since college has been in developing online gaming. Sometime around the year 2000 I began designing my "dream" game - that game is very much like the game described in the first three volumes of the Omegaverse series. Given that it seems unlikely that I'll ever have the opportunity to make the game, I thought it natural to at least use what I'd designed to, hopefully, entertain some folks in another way. When I discovered LitRPG, it all kind of fell into place. One of the tools a game designer uses is called more.