Ian Livingstone awarded CBE
"I'm unbelievably happy, proud and delighted"
UK industry figurehead and Eidos life president Ian Livingstone was awarded a CBE in the New Year Honours list.
"I'm unbelievably happy, proud and delighted to be in the New Year Honours list to be appointed CBE," he tweeted on December 29, adding that it was also his 63rd birthday. He was previously awarded an OBE in 2006.
These days Livingstone is best known as a passionate campaigner for better computer teaching in UK schools and tax breaks for the industry, but he started out as a co-founder of Games Workshop and co-author of the Fighting Fantasy series. He went on to found Eidos in 1990.
"I'm genuinely humbled to get something," he told the BBC of the honour.
"My life has been all about games, and I think we learn an awful lot through play. Writing Fighting Fantasy books with Steve Jackson in the 1980s seemed to have got a whole generation of children reading again. And I'm delighted that what we created not just manifested itself in interactive books but it's actually inspired people to join the computer games industry."