A brief history of Warhammer

From the early days of Games Workshop to PC gaming success, follow us on the trail of the greatest gaming setting ever envisaged – WARHAMMER!

You may not know it, but 1983 was a pivotal year in gaming. 

To give you a bit of perspective, that was the year that both Bob Hawke and Margaret Thatcher were elected to power. It was the year we won the America's Cup, and the first time the Global Positioning System was made available for public use; the GNU Project was also first announced in 1983. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers released their first album. The Cold War was still on, the IRA was still setting off bombs, and Return of the Jedi proved a smash hit in cinemas. 

But more importantly to gamers everywhere, and of every stripe, is the release of the first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, a tactical rules system for fighting epic conflicts between armies of fiddly metal models.

Nearly twenty years later, that simple set of rules has spawned a billion-dollar gaming industry covering wargames, RPGs, novels, and even (soon) a CGI film - not to mention a raft of computer games on everything from PC to Sega Saturn. With Dawn of War now a household name, and Space Marine soon to truly show off the awesome brutality of the Warhammer 40,000 universe in all its intimate glory, we track the history of this gaming phenomenon from its humble beginnings to the dominating position it sits in today.

Humble beginnings
Formed in 1975, Games Workshop didn't get up to much for the first few years - there wasn't even a hint of the kind of fantastic creations that were to come. Instead, the company made wooden boards for traditional games like chess and backgammon. Hardly inspiring stuff, but if you're at all a student of pen and paper gaming, two of the three founding members should ring a bell - Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.

John Peake was the third founding member, though he left the company after only one year. Peake was the more traditional of the three founders, so his departure allowed Jackson and Livingstone to instead focus on a new and more esoteric side of gaming - roleplaying.

Games Workshop, in those days, had a licensing deal to distribute Dungeons and Dragons in the United Kingdom. DnD was a very different beast back in this days, but it was still popular - so much so that Jackson and Livingstone were able to run conventions, publish a newsletter-slash-magazine on their hobby, and eventually open the first Games Workshop store in the heady days of 1978, a year after the first published edition of the GW magazine, White Dwarf.

In 1979, GW helped set up Citadel Miniatures to produce 25mm scale fantasy figures for the growing RPG and wargaming market, but otherwise, GW's bread and butter was reprinting other company's games - notably Call of Cthulhu, Traveller and Runequest. Through to 1983, Games Workshop didn't publish any of its own material outside of White Dwarf. Along with Dungeons and Dragons, these are still some of the biggest and most popular titles in gaming today, so that should give you an idea of the kind of success a company could have reprinting their material.

In fact, it's not a huge stretch to say that Games Workshop directly helped those games get where they are today.

While not a property the company owned, GW published original roleplaying systems based on popular properties such as Doctor Who (the original Doctor Who series, of course!) and some of the classic comic series produced under the banner of cult favourite publisher 2000 AD. Games Workshop produced a Judge Dredd RPG, as well as a mess of colourful boardgames. These were produced well into the late 80s.

In tandem, Citadel Miniatures also had the rights to produce licensed miniatures. However, it's a business truism that you only make real money with original intellectual properties, and in the early 80s Games Workshop was about to hit paydirt.