Livingstone attended Altrincham Grammar School for Boys, and left armed with (he claims) only one A level in Geography. He has retained his close links with the school on numerous occasions including to donate money for a refurbishment of the ICT suite, and also to give a speech and present awards to the GCSE graduates of 1998.

Games Workshop

Livingstone co-founded Games Workshop in early 1975 with flatmates John Peake and Steve Jackson, and began distributing Dungeons & Dragons and other TSR products later that year.

Under the direction of Livingstone and Jackson, Games Workshop expanded from being a bedroom mail order company to a successful gaming manufacturer and retail chain. In June 1977, partially to advertise the opening of the first Games Workshop store, Livingstone and Jackson launched the gaming magazine White Dwarf, which Livingstone edited for the first 74 issues.

They opened a number of Games Workshop stores and then Ian and Steve together with Bryan Ansell founded Citadel Miniatures in Newark to make miniatures for games.

Ian Livingstone has been the host of the executive level GameHorizon conference for the last 3 years.

Fighting Fantasy

In 1981 Jackson and Livingstone devised the concept of mixing a role playing game with a book, resulting in the Fighting Fantasy book series. The first Fighting Fantasy book was co-written by Jackson and Livingstone, but following an instruction from publishers Penguin to write more books "as quickly as possible", the pair wrote subsequent books separately. The series has sold over 14 million copies to date, with Livingstone's Deathtrap Dungeon selling over 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom alone.

Videogame industry

In the mid 1980s Livingstone did some design work for video game publisher Domark, and in 1993 he returned to the company, this time as a major investor and board member. In 1995 Domark was acquired by the video technology company Eidos plc, which had floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1990, and formed the major part of the newly created Eidos Interactive. In 2005 Eidos was taken over by SCi and Livingstone was then the only former board member to be retained, taking on the role of product acquisition director. He contributed to the Tomb Raider project entitled Anniversary (an enhanced version of the original Tomb Raider game), which was released in 2007. In 2009, Japanese video-game company Square Enix completed a buyout of Eidos Interactive and Ian was promoted to Life President of Eidos.

Skills Champion

In 2010 Livingstone was asked to act as the Skills Champion by Ed Vaizey, tasked with producing a report reviewing the UK video games industry. The report is due in 2011 and will be a, "complete bottom up review of the whole education system relating to games."

• In 2002, Livingstone won the Gift of the Academy in the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards for outstanding contribution to the community.

• Livingstone was awarded an Order of the British Empire, for "Services to the Computer Games Industry" in the New Years Honours List 2006.