Games & puzzles
born 1949
Co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and co-founder of Games Workshop.
A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Ian Livingstone, their publishers or their estate. Ian Livingstone appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.
Biography
Sir Ian Livingstone is an English fantasy author and games entrepreneur. In 1975 he co-founded Games Workshop with his flatmates John Peake and Steve Jackson, who began by distributing Dungeons & Dragons in Europe from their flat, and built a mail-order company into a gaming manufacturer and retail chain.
With Jackson he created the Fighting Fantasy series of role-playing gamebooks — books the reader plays by making choices and rolling dice — beginning with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in 1982. In the 1990s he helped lead Eidos, the publisher of Tomb Raider, and he later wrote a government-commissioned review of skills in the UK video-games industry.
Works
Timeline
1975
Co-founded Games Workshop with John Peake and Steve Jackson.
1977
Games Workshop opened its first shop in Hammersmith; Livingstone and Jackson launched the magazine White Dwarf, which he edited.
1982
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, was published.
1995
Helped create Eidos Interactive as executive chairman of Eidos Plc.
2002
Won the BAFTA Interactive Special Award for outstanding contribution to the industry.
2010
Asked by the government to act as Skills Champion and review the UK video-games industry.
Why they are here
Fighting Fantasy made the gamebook — a story you play by choosing your path and rolling dice — a mainstream form for a generation of young readers, and sits between the traditional puzzle book and the video game. It is the game-book tradition's best-known example.
His work as a publisher and executive shaped the British games industry as well as its books.
Nearby on the shelf
These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Ian Livingstone, and they are not a recommendation on Ian Livingstone’s behalf — only the same shelf.
63 Games from 5,000 Years of Human Play — Rules, Boards and Stories from 42 Cultures, Ready to Play Tonight
Emre Doğan
60 Games That Need Nothing but a Pencil — with Where Each One Came From and How to Win
Emre Doğan
Volume One: The Puzzles You Can Solve Tonight — Five Chapters Complete in the 1893 Text, Annotated, with Every Figure Redrawn
Emre Doğan
Edward Falkener's 1892 Reconstruction, Annotated — with Dr Samuel Birch's 1864 Paper, a Register of Reconstructions, Five Original Diagrams and the Move Tables Rebuilt from the Scan
Emre Doğan
Related authors
Sources
Everything on this page about Ian Livingstone is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.
