Games - Ian Livingstone

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	Games - Ian Livingstone

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 Game Book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and co-founder of Games Workshop.

Livingstone founded Games Workshop in 1975 with flatmate Steve Jackson, and began distributing Dungeons and 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.

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.

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.

In 2002, Ian won the Gift of the Academy in the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards for outstanding contribution to the community.

In 2005, Ian wrote the first new Fighting Fantasy Gamebook since 1995, entitled "Eye of the Dragon".

Ian was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire) for "Services to the Computer Games Industry" in the New Years Honours List 2006

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