Jeff Dee

Jeff Dee (born May 15, 1961) is an American artist and game designer. Based in Austin, Texas, he is a recognized figure in the role-playing game community and game industry. His illustrative work shows comic book art form and influence.

Biography

In the late 1970s, while Dee was still a teenager, he and Jack Herman co-created Villains and Vigilantes, the first complete superhero role-playing game. The game was published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1979. Dee and Herman convinced Scott Bizar to produce a second edition, which was published in 1982. Dee came up with the idea of creating a role-playing game based on cartoons when he, Greg Costikyan, and several other designers were talking about genres for which game systems had not yet been designed; although they agreed that such a game would be impossible to design, a few years later Costikyan designed Toon as a full game with the assistance of Warren Spector.

Jeff Dee was the youngest artist in TSR history when he began his work at the age of eighteen. In 1997, with his partner 'Manda, Dee founded UNIgames, a publisher of role-playing, board and computer games. Dee created a new superhero roleplaying game called Living Legends in 2005, although the project was originally titled Advanced Villains and Vigilantes. In 2009, he co-founded Nemesis Games, developers of an MMO named Gargantua.