Richard Rouse

Richard Rouse III
Richard Rouse III at the Game Developers Conference in 2010
Nationality	American
Occupation	Video game designer, writer

Richard Rouse III is an American video game designer and writer best known as the designer of The Suffering games and the author of Game Design: Theory & Practice.

Rouse started out as a writer for Macintosh gaming magazines Inside Mac Games and Mac Games Digest while attending the University of Chicago. He produced two Macintosh games, the story-centric fantasy RPG Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis and the military first-person shooter and strategy hybrid Damage Incorporated. Both were based on games by Bungie Software (Minotaur and Marathon 2, respectively), whose founders were university friends of his. Rouse went on to work at Leaping Lizard Software where he was lead designer on the 1998 3D remake of Centipede.

From there he moved to Surreal Software where he was lead designer and writer on the action horror game The Suffering and creative director and writer on its sequel, The Suffering: Ties That Bind.

In October 2005 he became the Director of Game Design at Midway. Rouse has written about game design, most notably in his book Game Design: Theory & Practice, first released in 2001 and revised in 2004, and also for magazines Game Developer, Develop, and Siggraph Computer Graphics, and has spoken at the Game Developer's Conference and E3.