Journalist, Editor & Screenwriter · ACE, The One, PC Gamer (UK and US) · 1990s · British-American
A founding writer of PC Gamer in Britain who went on to edit its American edition, then left journalism to write The Book of Eli, co-write the story of Rogue One and shape Telltale's The Walking Dead.
Gary Whitta was born in Poplar, London, on 21 July 1972. He started as a writer for ACE, one of the British multi-format magazines of the late 1980s, and when ACE closed in 1992 he became deputy editor of The One for Amiga Games. He was then involved in founding PC Gamer in the UK, the magazine that helped define how PC games were covered in Britain, and later moved to the United States to become editor-in-chief of its American edition. Whitta's second career has been in storytelling. He wrote the screenplay for The Book of Eli (2010), co-wrote After Earth (2013) with M. Night Shyamalan, and shares the story credit for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) with John Knoll. He never fully left games, either: he oversaw narrative development on Telltale's The Walking Dead, wrote its fourth episode, and later returned to help finish The Walking Dead: The Final Season. His path — from reviewing games for a living to writing them and writing for Hollywood — is one of the clearest examples of how the British magazine boom of the 1980s and 1990s trained a generation of writers who went on to work across the wider entertainment industry. He became a US citizen in 2009.