Ep. 259: The Knight Who Started a Role-playing Revolution

Fascinating Nouns

Sir Ian Livingstone is a real knight, known as the “Knight of the Nerds”. Never has a moniker been more apt. Ian and his partner Steve Jackson were early fanatics of various complex strategy games. They turned this love into a paradigm changing company called “Games Workshop”. Thanks to an exclusive deal with Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax, Games Workshop quickly became an industry leader in role-playing games. They sold D&D, had their own miniatures company, published the industry leading gamer magazine “White Dwarf”, and even developed their own games, which included an early version of Towerblox, which was about 2 years ahead of Jenga. Then in the 80’s Ian and Steve started writing their “Fighting Fantasy” series of novels, which were “Choose Your Own Adventure” style game books with stats, dice, and a story that took several times to get through. These books were my bread and butter as a child. I loved them. Then Ian went on to work in video games and even had a hand in creating the iconic Lara Croft for the Tomb Raider series of games. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ian to discuss all of this amazing stuff, plus I even got him to play a few tunes on his harmonica and discuss his 1976 Topps complete collection of baseball cards. We really go through it all!

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