Born on 29 December 1949 in Prestbury, Cheshire, England, Ian Livingstone founded Games Workshop early 1975 with his flatmates Steve Jackson and John Peake. The company began by publishing Owl & Weasela newsletter on board games, role-playing games and wargames before distributing Dungeons & Dragons and other games TSR later that year.
Games Workshop launches specialist magazine White Dwarf in 1977 with Livingstone as editor, and opened its first shop in West London in 1978. In early 1979, Livingstone and Jackson founded Citadel Miniatures with Bryan Ansell to make miniatures for role-playing games and specialist ranges Warhammer (1983) and Warhammer 40,000 (1987).
In 1982, Livingstone co-wrote The Sorcerer of Fire Mountain with Steve Jackson, and would go on to write fifteen other game books on his own Fantastic challengesof which City of Thieves (1983) and The Labyrinth of Death (1984), the series having sold over twenty million copies. He also created several board games, including Judge Dredd (1982) and video games such asEureka! (1984), the first title published by Domark.
After selling Games Workshop with Steve Jackson in 1991, Ian Livingstone invested in Domark in 1993, which merged with three other companies to form Domark in 1995. Eidoswhere he served as President until 2002, and then Creative Director. There he launched global video game licences such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Hitmanand is involved in the design of Beach Life (2002) or Pony Friends (2007). In 2009, Square Enix acquired Eidos and appointed Livingstone 'chairman for life' until he left the company in 2013. Until 2017, he was Chairman of Playdemicdeveloper of the worldwide mobile success Golf Clash.
He co-wrote with Alex Hope the report Next Gen published by NESTA in 2011, recommending changes to education policy to bring computing into the school curriculum. He is ranked sixteenth of the hundred most influential people in the UK digital economy by Wired in 2012. He is currently non-executive director for Sumo Group as well as Midoki, Fusebox Games, Flavourworks, Antstream and Playmob.
He is a patron of National Videogame Musemcurator at British Game Institute and Vice-Chairman of Special Effecta charity that uses video games and technology to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities. He is in the process of opening two Livingstone Academies in collaboration with Aspirations Academies Trust dedicated to digital creativity and the arts. Livingstone won a special award at BAFTA in 2002 and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2006, then a Commander in 2013, for his services to the British video games industry.
