Rick Dakan Bio

Rick Dakan lives, writes, and plays in Sarasota, Florida, his home and native town. Born in 1972, he grew up in Florida before going on to attend college at American University in Washington DC (where he earned a BA in History) and then Ohio State University (where he didn’t earn an MA in History). It was in those bleak, cold, Ohio years of the mid-90’s that be started writing for a living, and he hasn’t stopped since. Over the next few years he scratched out a rewarding if poor living writing role-playing game books for numerous product lines, including: Wraith: The Oblivion, Kult, Conspiracy X, Deadlands, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Dungeons & Dragons.

In 2000 he came up with an idea for an online computer game which eventually became the hit 2004 release City of Heroes. Teaming up with long-time friend Michael Lewis and a bevy of talented folks, he moved out to San Jose, California and helped found Cryptic Studios. Three years later his partners fired him, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to work on the game and writing and publishing a twelve issue comic book series based on the game.

Having written game books, magazine articles, design documents, Website copy, in-game dialog, advertising crap, and comic books, Rick finally buckled down in 2005 and wrote a damn novel, just like he’d been talking about for so long. The result is Geek Mafia, which you should absolutely go buy right now. Although inspired by various aspects of his life in Silicon Valley, the book is a lot more interesting than anything that ever happened to him in real life (except maybe that weird summer when he was 23, but that’s another story).

He spent the next year working on the sequel, Geek Mafia: Mile Zero and traveling around the country and the world to hacker conventions. He's since become a regular fixture in the hacker scene and is working on a non-fiction book about privacy with Private Investigator Steven Rambam and a second non-fiction book on hackers. His third novel, The Cthulhu Cult, is almost finished, and the third Geek Mafia novel is already under way and should come out in early 2009. In his spare time he studies martial arts, plays too many video games, reads an immense amount, and is active in local politics.