Long started playing Champions in 1982, and began writing for the game, starting with articles in the Hero Games house magazine, Adventurers Club, ten years later. He began working in the RPG industry in 1992 as a freelancer for Hero Games. Long wrote the subgenre book Dark Champions in 1993, as well as several additional Champions sourcebooks to support it. Long authored The Ultimate Martial Artist (1994) and The Ultimate Mentalist (1996) as the first two books in a line conceived of by Steve Peterson as sourcebooks that could be used with all of the genres of the Hero System. Other works included Justice Not Law, An Eye for an Eye, Watchers of the Dragon, and articles for Adventurers Club, The HERO System Almanacs, and similar publications. He soon branched out into working for other game companies, such as White Wolf Publishing.

In 1997, Long quit his job as a practicing trial lawyer to write and design games as a freelancer. Gold Rush Games hired Long to write a fifth edition of the Hero System, which he finished in July 1999, turning it in to Hero Games because of the changing relationship between the two companies at the time. During this time, he wrote for numerous companies, including White Wolf Publishing, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Steve Jackson Games, Last Unicorn Games, and Chameleon Eclectic. Long joined the developers working for Last Unicorn Games on the “Icon system” for their line of licensed Star Trek role-playing games; to get the Star Trek: The Next Generation role-playing game ready for GenCon 31, Long was flown out to Los Angeles for two weeks. After the design of Icon was done, Long was made the line developer for the Star Trek: Deep Space 9 role-playing game, and by 1999 he had become a full-time employee of Last Unicorn Games.