Background
Maurice was a non-commissioned writer for Weekending on radio and Spitting Image on TV. He was part of Richard Curtis’ Comic Relief writing team, devising fundraising and sketch ideas for the TV show and the nationwide event. He holds a Ph.D in Creative Writing from Newcastle University.

As writer…Fiction Having been awarded a Northern Promise Award by New Writing North in 2005, Maurice’s first collection of short stories, Photocopies of Heaven, was published by Elastic Press in November 2006. Dirk Maggs, director of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series said Photocopies is: “A collection of succinctly observed events, characters and phenomena which takes a fresh look at the world and our collisions with it. The style is spare, unexpected and funny, the reader calmly presented with astonishing quirks of fate, the profundity of common physics and disturbing visions of everyday objects possessed by powers unknown."

Short-listed for British Fantasy Society Award in 2007, Jonathan Oliver of the British Fantasy Society , said: ”…this is easily one of the best fiction collections I have read this year.”
Sean Parker of zone-sf.com said: “The stories themselves are often quite funny, sometimes verging on the surreal or the fantastic, and occasionally unexpectedly moving. Often all at the same time.”
Sarah Ann Watts of futurefire.net said: “The style is direct and engaging and the whole quality of the book is inventive—a celebration of the short story form that showcases the author's confidence and skill; storytelling for the twenty-first century with a human face.”

For further details on his fiction see mauricesuckling.com

As writer…Games and Interactive Narrative
Maurice has worked in computer games since writing the screenplay for GT Interactive’s seminal Driver in 1998, which won a Moving Image Interactive BAFTA (1999). He went on to write the screenplays for Driver 2 (2000), Stuntman (2002) and Driver 3 (2004), all with the same development team. Simultaneously Maurice worked as a script editor on Empire Interactive’s lightgun game Endgame (2002) and on Atari’s free-roaming RPG Boiling Point (2005). He has also written the script for, and script edited the Little Britain Video Game (2007) and worked as a writer on Pipemania (2008) and on Avaloop’s online world Papermint (2008). In 2008 he co-wrote a chapter in the IGDA book Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing (2008).
Since 2005, with The Mustard Corporation, Maurice has worked as a co-writer for Sega’s Virtua Pro Football (2006) Let’s Build A Soccer Team (2006) and Virtua Tennis 3 (2007); he has co-written the script and story for Driver: Parallel Lines (2005), Driver 76 (2006), Emergency Heroes(2008), Don King presents Prize fighter (2008), and Unsolved Crimes (2008), and is currently co-writing the script and story of an unannounced title for a major Japanese developer.
Also with The Mustard Corporation, he has worked on three BBC JAM learning projects as a writer and interactive consultant.

As a games designer
From designing amateur board, card, and wargames, Maurice has gone on to contribute design elements in a professional capacity to numerous computer games, including Driver 76, and titles in development for Middlesbrough developers Touch Games, for Lisbon developers Biodroid, and for The Mustard Corporation’s own titles being developed on iPhone, DS and Wii.

Voice Directing and Project Management
Maurice has now directed or produced the voices for a number of games, including Driver 2, Driver 3, Stuntman and Driver: Parallel Lines, Driver 76, Pokemon Battle Revolution and Wii Fit. He has worked with a vast range of actors from the famous like Michelle Rodriguez and Mickey Rourke to those with cult status like Antonio Fargus. He has worked in a full range of genres, including comedy, drama and sports.

Consultancies
In the 1990s Maurice worked as a creative consultant and copywriter for companies such as Shell, Avis, British Airways, Kenco, Martini, Nescafe, Britivic and the Post Office. Between 1998 and 2006 Maurice was a freelance creative consultant to Reflections Interactive; here he advised on interactive narrative and game design and consulted on music selection, together with directing motion capture and voice recording sessions.

Maurice continues to work with a range of artists and musicians on experimental forms of media and on projects meshing TV and film, fiction, on-line, music, mobile phone, handheld game consoles and next generation game hardware.

In recent years Maurice has given talks on games writing and interactive narrative in a number of universities and at a number of conventions, from Reading to Shanghai, Newcastle to Tokyo, London to Chongxing.

Maurice has also devised and run a number of creative workshops for the BBC in the field of interactive media, interactive narrative, and on-line games.