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Livingstone becomes 'life president' of Eidos
Longtime Eidos executive Ian Livingstone has been promoted to life president of ... wait, he's the what? Livingstone now holds the title of "life president," following Square Enix's takeover of the troubled British publisher. The executive will continue working in the creative process and "act as a spokesperson for the Eidos group," reports GI.biz.Livingstone will also continue working with the British government to push forward tax credits and the "skills agenda." We Googled "life president" because we figured this was some business term we'd just never heard of. Nope, it appears totally made up. The closest thing we could find was the term "President for Life," a title used by dictators -- which is not what's going on with Livingstone ... we think.Just to make sure Wikipedia and Google hadn't missed anything in their combined infinite wisdom, we decided to contact several major academic business institutions. Harvard and Wharton have yet to return our phone calls; however, Stanford's media relations offered, "I can't think of any academic with serious scholarship wanting to weigh in on this."
Eidos' Livingstone presumes we need more iconic characters
Eidos' Product Acquisition Director Ian Livingstone, speaking at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, said that game developers need to create more iconic characters. Not just for games, but so they can be used in various other products as well. He showed the audience a series of iconic characters and mixed in there were game heroes ... some people in the audience couldn't put names to the characters. Livingstone said, "If we all work in the games industry, what does that say?"Eidos has definitely had a focus on iconic characters. From Lara Croft to Agent 47, to the upcoming Kane & Lynch. From what we saw of the game at E3, the characters exude bad-boy personality, which can also be seen in the trailer. Livingstone says that Kane originally looked much younger -- "a bit of a ladies' man." He says the decision was made to age him up and scar him to keep in line with the story. He also says that Lara Croft was originally going to be Lara Cruz, but then the decision was made to make her a posh British lady, so the team went through the phone book until they found the right name.
The pen is mightier than the sword; Ian Livingstone on games
Pen-and-paper legend Ian Livingstone OBE sat down with MMORPGDot to talk about his move into PC gaming. It's an interesting sideways shift; the interview examines the differences between pen and paper media and computer games.Ian concludes with the titillating information that he wants to produce the "definitive" fantasy game, and that "multiplayer on console is definitely the way to go"; with over ten years' worth of notes, if anyone can pull it off, it's Ian.
Ian Livingstone awarded OBE for services to gaming
Ian Livingstone of SCi Entertainment is an industry legend whose involvement in gaming dates back thirty years to Dungeons and Dragons. Many people remember him fondly for his Fighting Fantasy adventure books, written with Steve Jackson, but Livingstone has been going from strength to strength at Eidos and SCi since then. In recognition of all this, he joins Peter Molyneux (among others) by being awarded an OBE for services to the computer games industry, showing that a lifetime of making a career out of a hobby can definitely pay off.
