Ricardo Pinto moved with his family from Lisbon, Portugal, to London when he was six, and then to Dundee in Scotland. In 1979, he commenced a degree in Mathematics at the University of Dundee. In 1983, Pinto moved to London to work as a programmer writing computer games. He became interested in creating the plot for games and wrote Kryomek and Hivestone as support material for tabletop wargames.
While still at university Pinto wrote a 600-page manuscript which he later said "contained a first, vague impression" of what would become his The Stone Dance of the Chameleon series. After ten years working in the computer gaming industry he spent two years unemployed and teaching himself to write, during which time he developed the Stone Dance further.
