Mike Carr (game designer)

Mike Carr (born September 4, 1951) is a writer and game designer.

Career

Carr is known for writing Fight in the Skies (1968, also known as Dawn Patrol). He also co-authored Don't Give Up The Ship! (1971) with Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Carr began wargaming with the International Federation of Wargamers as a teenager. At the invitation of Gygax, he joined TSR, Inc. in 1976, for whom he wrote an introductory Dungeons and Dragons module called In Search of the Unknown (1979). Since it was included with the Dungeons and Dragons introductory box set the module enjoyed a sizeable print run. As the role playing game evolved into a more complete and complex version known as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Carr served as editor for three hardbound volumes, the Monster Manual, Dungeon Masters Guide and Players Handbook and wrote the Foreword to each book's early editions. In the early 1980s Carr authored three children's books which were published by TSR, including one in the Endless Quest series entitled "Robbers & Robots".

Carr worked as an editor for TSR, with his editing credits for Dungeons & Dragons including the original Monster Manual (1977), Vault of the Drow (1978), Players Handbook (1978), White Plume Mountain (1979), The Village of Hommlet (1979), The World of Greyhawk (1980), The Keep on the Borderlands (1981), Descent into the Depths of the Earth (1981), Against the Giants (1981), and Deep Dwarven Delve (not printed until 1999).^[1]

Carr was honored in 2007 as the only person who has attended all 40 Gen Con game conventions since the founding of that event in 1968. His Fight in the Skies game is also the only one that has been played at all 40 of those conventions.

In addition to being part of the Dungeons and Dragons phenomenon from its inception through 1983 (when he left TSR), Carr was subsequently involved in another remarkable story. After answering a job ad in the Wall Street Journal, he was selected by legendary commodity futures trader Richard Dennis as one of the trainees for a trading group that became known as the "Turtles". Carr was a successful futures trader as part of that program for several years and after it was disbanded ran his own investment management firm throughout the 1990s. From 2000 to 2007, he worked as manager of marketing communications for Generac Power Systems, Inc., a manufacturer of standby generators.

Carr works as a marketing consultant and as a freelance writer, where his specialty is writing about snowmobiling.^[2] In addition to authoring snowmobile travel articles for several magazines, he writes the "Making Tracks" column that appears in the Wisconsin Snowmobile News magazine. He is also involved in the production of the Aerodrome magazine, a newsletter for devotees of the Dawn Patrol game. That publication was founded by Carr in 1969 and has published more than 150 issues, which is a remarkable track record for a gaming fanzine.

References