Ken Lightner is a game designer with experience in multiple fields. His primary area of expertise is in computer games.

Career

Ken Lightner is the founder of

Holistic Design Holistic Design, Inc. (HDI), is an American game company. It was founded in 1992 as Several Dudes Holistic Gaming. The company has developed many computer games in its history, including ''Battles of Destiny'', ''Hammer of the Gods (video game), ...

. Lightner co-designed a tabletop miniatures spaceship combat game with

Chris Wiese Chris Wiese is a role-playing game designer. Career Chris Wiese began in the gaming industry as the marketing director and acting CEO of Holistic Design. He is one of the current partners in the company. He has made contributions to a number of th ...

called '' Noble Armada'' (1998), designed to be compatible with the role-playing game ''

Fading Suns ''Fading Suns'' is a science fiction space opera role-playing game published by Holistic Design. The setting was also used for a PC game (''Emperor of the Fading Suns''), a live action role-playing game ('' Passion Play''), and for a space co ...

''. Lightner was head of programming for video games at Holistic, while

Andrew Greenberg Andrew Greenberg is a game designer of tabletop role-playing games and role-playing video games. Career Greenberg was one of White Wolf Publishing's original developers on '' Vampire: The Masquerade'' (1991). He was the line editor for ''Vamp ...

directed development for video games. Lightner created additional game lines specifically for publication using the d20 System, including modern world military adventures such as ''Afghanistan'' (2002). Among his more notable successes with Holistic include ''Battles of Destiny'', ''Hammer of the Gods'', ''Final Liberation'', ''Machiavelli the Prince'', ''Merchant Prince II'', ''

Emperor of the Fading Suns ''Emperor of the Fading Suns'' is a turn-based strategy 4X video game developed by Holistic Design, based on their in-house role-playing game setting '' Fading Suns''. It was released for Microsoft Windows in February 1997. The game had a wide ...

'', and '' Mall Tycoon''. He also worked heavily on a computer game called ''Noble Armada'' that never materialized. He has worked as a third-party developer for very large companies such as Mindscape, Take Two Interactive, Red Storm,

MicroProse MicroProse is an American video game publisher and video game developer, developer founded by Bill Stealey, Sid Meier, and Andy Hollis in 1982. It developed and published numerous games, including starting the ''Civilization (series), Civilizatio ...

, and Segasoft. ''Mall Tycoon'' was arguably his largest game, which sold extremely well. The Merchant Prince series was highly critically acclaimed. He was the line developer for their Real-Life Roleplaying series covering d20 Afghanistan, d20 Columbia, d20 Somalia and the d20 FBI. He also contributed heavily towards the flagship rpg product Holistic Design produced ''Fadings Suns'', being the principal author of the military supplement ''Legions of the Empire''. He also worked in conjunction with

to design the miniature based game ''Carnage'' and ''Noble Armada'' (upon which the aforementioned Computer Game was based). He also contributed fiction to the Book of All Flesh by

Eden Studios Eden Studios was a commercial recording facility in west London. It opened in 1967, originally at 11 Eden Street in Kingston upon Thames (now under the Eden Walk shopping centre), before moving to 20-24 Beaumont Road in Chiswick in 1972. It was ...

. Holistic shut down all of its production on role-playing game lines in 2003, and Lightner later co-founded the computer game company Blue Heat Games. This new company specializes in cell phone games, and some of his credits with them include ''MLB Baseball 2004'', ''NHL Hockey'' and ''Sega Snowboarding''. He has also had a short story published in an anthology produced by

Eden Studios, Inc Eden Studios, Inc. is an American role-playing game publisher founded in 1996 by George Vasilakos, M. Alexander Jurkat, and Ed Healy. Currently run by Mr. Vasilakos, Eden Studios is best known for ''Conspiracy X'', the ''Buffyverse role-playi ...

References

External links

Ken Lightner
at

MobyGames MobyGames is a commercial website that catalogs information on video games and the people and companies behind them via crowdsourcing. This includes nearly 300,000 games for hundreds of platforms. The site is supported by banner ads and a small ...

Official Holistic Design websiteBlue Heat Games

Siegecon - Biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lightner, Ken Living people Role-playing game designers Video game programmers Year of birth missing (living people)

Career

See also

References

External links