Ian Livingstone should, by rights, be a household name. After all, he has played a huge part in the cultural education of anyone who grew up in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Having co-founded gaming shop chain Games Workshop, he went on to co-write the legendary Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, which sold more than 20m copies and got an entire generation of children into reading. And then there’s what he’s done for the world of video games …
Livingstone fell in love with video gaming nearly 40 years ago after buying one of the earliest home consoles, the Intellivision. “I come from a pre-computer era, so I started by playing with tabletop miniatures, board games and role-playing games, before video games came along,” he says. “I liked games that were immersive and told a story.”
This led him naturally to the Intellivision. The strong storytelling, structure and user experience – or gameplay – of its games captured Livingstone’s imagination: “I bought it not long after it launched in 1980, and I owned about 15 games for it. Talk about simple graphics, but it was the gameplay that counted – it had that magic fairy dust that made you want to come back and play over and over again.”
The Intellivision played a formative role in Livingstone’s future: “Intellivision games made me aware of the potential for the growth of video games. I was keen to be part of this new, rapidly evolving industry,” he says. “Playing games has been a lifelong hobby for me, and I was lucky enough to turn my hobby into a career.”
Publishing his first computer game in 1984, Livingstone went on to co-found Eidos, the company that brought the world the iconic Lara Croft. Since then, he has been an ever-present in the industry – and a passionate advocate for the benefits of gaming in children’s lives: “I believe games-based learning, digital creativity, coding and computational thinking are meta-skills for the 21st century.”
Ian Livingstone has donated his fee for this article to his educational charity, the Livingstone Foundation. It has partnered with Aspirations Academies Trust to open two Livingstone Academies in 2019 in London and Bournemouth.
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