Dave Ellis (game designer)

Dave Ellis (born 1965) is an author, video game writer and video game designer. He is also an avid classic arcade game collector and was a columnist for GameRoom Magazine.

Ellis got his start in the video game industry with MicroProse in March 1992 in Hunt Valley, Maryland. He started out in customer service then transferred to QA and eventually worked his way up to game design. It is here Ellis was first exposed to X-COM, a game franchise he would be involved with one way or another for most of his career. In 1998, Ellis designed a new installment of the X-COM series, a space-shooter, X-COM: Interceptor.

Ellis remained with MicroProse for seven and half years, surviving two buy-outs (from Spectrum Holobyte and then Hasbro Interactive in 1999). During these years he served in various roles on several games. During this period, Ellis moved to the former MicroProse office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to work as the designer of X-COM: Genesis. He along with the rest of the studio were laid off that same year when Hasbro decided it did not want to be a video game developer.

Ellis then went to work for a new developer formed by former members of the Chapel Hill studio, Vicious Cycle Software. After less than a year, he left to work as a game designer for Random Games in Morrisville, North Carolina and remained there until November 2001, since which time the company has gone out of business. In 2005 Ellis rejoined Vicious Cycle as a game designer where he worked as a designer or writer (often both) on 19 titles for the PC and 11 different consoles and handhelds . Ellis remained with the company until November, 2015, when most of the team was laid off. Vicious Cycle closed its doors forever in January, 2016.

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