Ian Livingstone (born December 1949 in Prestbury, England) is an English fantasy author and entrepreneur. He is a co-writer of the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and co-founder of Games Workshop.
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Career
Games Workshop
Livingstone founded Games Workshop in 1975 with flatmate Steve Jackson, and began distributing Dungeons & Dragons later that year. Under the direction of Livingstone and Jackson, Games Workshop expanded from being a bedroom mail order company to a successful gaming manufacturer and retail chain. In June 1977, partially to advertise the opening of the first Games Workshop store, Livingstone and Jackson launched the gaming magazine White Dwarf, which Livingstone also edited. They opened a number of Games Workshop stores and then Ian and Steve together with Bryan Ansell founded Citadel Miniatures in Newark to make miniatures for games.
Fighting Fantasy
In 1981 Jackson and Livingstone devised the concept of mixing a role playing game with a book, resulting in the Fighting Fantasy book series. The first Fighting Fantasy book was co-written by Jackson and Livingstone, but following an instruction from publishers Penguin to write more books "as quickly as possible", the pair wrote subsequent books separately. The series has sold over 14 million copies to date, with Livingstone's Deathtrap Dungeon selling over 300,000 copies in Britain alone.
Video Game Industry
In the mid 1980s Livingstone did some design work for video game publisher Domark, and in 1993 he returned to the company, this time as a major investor and board member. In 1995 Domark was acquired by the video technology company Eidos plc, which had floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1990, and formed the major part of the newly created Eidos Interactive. Livingstone left Eidos in May 2005 after the company was taken over by SCi. He then joined SCi in September, the only former Eidos board member to be asked back, taking on the role of product acquisition director. He contributed to the Tomb Raider project entitled Tomb Raider: Anniversary, an enhanced version of the original Tomb Raider game which was released in 2007.[1]
Awards
- In 2002, Livingstone won the Gift of the Academy in the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards for outstanding contribution to the community.
- Livingstone was awarded an Order of the British Empire, for "Services to the Computer Games Industry" in the New Years Honours List 2006.
External links
- Biography
- GameSpot Interview - Interview with GameSpot about the Tomb Raider series and the console wars
- Ian Livingstone's profile at MobyGames
