Product Code Database
Andrew J. Looney (born November 5, 1963) is a game designer and computer programmer. He is also a photographer, a cartoonist, a video-blogger, and a marijuana-legalization advocate.
Andrew and Kristin Looney together founded the games company Looney Labs, where Andrew is the chief creative officer. Looney Labs has published most of his game designs, such as Fluxx, Chrononauts, and the Icehouse game system. His other game designs include Aquarius, Nanofictionary, IceTowers, Treehouse, and Martian Coasters.
He and Kristin, his future spouse, met in 1986 when he started at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center as a software programmer. Kristin was a computer engineer designing computer chips. Keeping English as a side interest, he wrote "The Empty City", a science-fiction short story. Wanting a game in the story but feeling a card game as too boring, he created a fictional game, Icehouse, that used pyramids. Readers of the short story requested to learn how to play the game. Thus actual rules were invented for Icehouse, then Icehouse pieces were made to play the game. The pieces were made from resin in his apartment, which upset the landlord due to the smell. This led them to launch their own game company to sell the Icehouse game. After several years, Looney shut down Icehouse Games, Inc.
He and his wife launched Looney Laboratories in 1996 as a part-time home based design company. Andrew soon designed the Fluxx card game. He then went on to a brief career as a game programmer at Magnet Interactive Studios, where he created that company's only entry to the market, Icebreaker. Aquarius was Andy's and Labs' next game, launched in 1998. In 2002, a few years after Kristin went full-time with their company, Andy followed.
Looney holds on the game mechanics for:
Looney has won the following game design awards:
Patents & awards
Andy has three U.S. patents and five Origins Awards.
Works
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