My guest today is the English fantasy author and champion of the video game industry, Sir Ian Livingstone. In 1975, while in his mid-twenties, he founded a boardgame company, Games Workshop, which soon caught the attention of the American creators of a new tabletop game, Dungeons and Dragons.

My guest brokered a deal to sell D&D in the UK as a mail order company, and in 1977 opened the company’s first retail shop in South London. In 1982 he published the first of the Fighting Fantasy books, which have now sold more than 20 million copies.

He joined the video game industry and, at the publisher Eidos, helped bring the Tomb Raider and Hitman series to the world. In 2022 he was honoured with a knighthood for services to the games industry. “Play has always been seen as trivial,” he once said. “Yet when we arrive in this world, we all learn through play.”

Play the console:

• Baseball (1980)
• Championship Manager
• Tomb Raider (1996)
• Virtua Tennis
• Golf Clash

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