“He who dies with the most toys, wins.”

This is the motto of David “Zeb” Cook,
Senior Game Designer of TSR, Inc. Zeb, as
he is generally known, is working hard to
win. His mammoth collection of toy robots
and plastic Japanese monsters has threatened
to completely take over his office.

Zeb is perhaps the most versatile game
designer at TSR, having created role-playing
games, modules, family board games,
card games, rulebooks, and party mystery
games. He designed and wrote the AD&D®
game Oriental Adventures book under Gary
Gygax’s guidance and direction, and created
the PARTYZONE™ mystery game line.
The SPY RING™ Scenario, the first PARTYZONE
game, was named one of the Top
100 Games of 1985 by GAMES Magazine.

“I’m the TSR fire brigade,” Zeb says.
“Whenever there’s a licensed game or a
project in trouble, they throw it on my desk.
I like it that way, because I never know what
I’ll get to do next.”

Zeb’s wacky sense of humor and general
insanity keep life at TSR constantly hopping.
His legendary Bad Japanese Movie
Parties are raucous affairs in which the dialogue
supplied by the audience is much
funnier than what’s happening on the
screen. Zeb has also orchestrated many of
the water pistol shootouts that rage up and
down the halls, soaking innocent bystanders
as well as combatants with equal
glee.

It’s no wonder that Zeb’s favorite word is
“Wahoo!” — a word that describes his attitude
to game design as well as lifestyle.
“It’s most important to me that a game be
fun and simple to play,” he says. “It takes
hard work to make a simple game, but I
have fun at the same time. I've never lost
track of my childlike nature, which
is important for my work."
He became a high school teacher in Milligan,
Nebraska, where his students
awarded him the nickname “Zeb” because
his signature looked like a big “Z” and also
because he resembled a James Arness
character in an old Western whose name
happened to be “Zeb.” The name stuck.

One January, he saw an ad in DRAGON®
Magazine for a game designer position at
TSR. It seemed to him that this would be a
lot more fun than teaching, and his wife
said, “Why don’t you try it?” He completed
the designer test that the company then
used, and wrote a sample module section,
and . . . “Doggone! They liked me!”

Zeb was the third full-time game designer
hired by TSR. As Senior Designer, he coordinates
in-house playtesting and runs the
Thursday morning “show and tell” meeting
in which all the designers and editors bring
each other up to date on their projects.
“That’s enough management for me,” he
says.

“Game designing is hard work,” he says,
“but everything worth doing is hard work.
The important thing is to do it well, and to
have fun while you’re doing it.”

“Keep it fun, simple, and wahoo!” he
says, “and you’ll never go wrong.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
ROLE-PLAYING GAMES
ORIENTAL ADVENTURES
CONAN® THE BARBARIAN Game
THE ADVENTURES OF INDIANA
JONES™* Game
STAR FRONTIERS® Game

ADULT AND FAMILY GAMES
SPY RING™ Scenario, PARTYZONE™
Game #1
SIROCCO™ Master Rules
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK™ Game

MODULES
CM4 EARTHSHAKER
AC5 DRAGON™ TILES II
AC2 D&D® GAME COMBAT SHIELD
B6 THE VEILED SOCIETY
CB1 CONAN UNCHAINED!
M1 BLIZZARD PASS
X4 MASTER OF THE DESERT NOMADS
X5 TEMPLE OF DEATH
TS005 ORIENT EXPRESS
BH2 LOST CONQUlSTADOR MINE
X1 THE ISLE OF DREAD
I1 DWELLERS OF THE FORBIDDEN
ClTY
A1 SLAVE PITS OF THE UNDERCITY