Warhammer, a great British success story
A firm that makes small plastic figures has conquered the world of table-top games. By
Imagine that, 10 years ago, an elderly great-aunt left you £1,000 in her will, and you thought you’d be sensible and invest it. Sure, you could buy Google or Apple stock. But forget these obvious Silicon Valley choices, with their AI and data-harvesting search engines and their shiny gadgets: where you should have stuck your money is in a Nottingham-based company that makes plastic toy soldiers.
This week it was announced that Games Workshop had signed a deal with Amazon to produce TV shows and movies based on its most famous intellectual property, the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop war game.
The game is a quietly big deal. Known as 40K, it is now four decades old, a product of that same era of satirical British science fiction that gave us Judge Dredd. Set in a distant future of constant war, in a decaying, xenophobic, religious-fascist galactic human empire. There are no good guys.
The phrase “grimdark”, to describe bleak fantasy and sci-fi settings, is directly taken from the lines that open all 40K literature: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” And yet, despite or because of that grimness, it has millions of fans worldwide.
Games Workshop is one of Britain’s most successful entertainment companies, worth more than £3bn and raking in nearly £400m in revenue a year. It has 500 shops across 20 countries, from China to the US to New Zealand. If it was a tech company we’d call it a “unicorn” and Rishi
Sunak would talk it up during trade deals (maybe he does – his Home Secretary is a big fan).
But for some reason, despite being a British success story, it rarely gets the attention its devotees – among whom I count myself – would say it deserves.
And, despite many well-received video-game spin-offs and literally hundreds of novels of widely varying quality set in its universe, there has never been a worthwhile screen adaptation.
It might be quite a hard sell, especially to American audiences, if your lead character keeps virus-bombing civilian worlds he suspects of disloyalty. You probably wouldn’t take your kids to the Odeon for it and buy them the action figure afterward.
Whatever the reason, it’s a shame. Over 40K’s long life, it has become as rich a fictional setting as anything the more mainstream universes can offer. And the way that it’s developed is more interesting, in a way: the demands of fiction have had to be married to those of a tabletop game.
The entire lore, nowadays, turns on a great rebellion within the human empire, 10,000 years before the main story. But that rebellion, known as the Horus Heresy, was first invented because the designers of the 1988 40K spin-off Adeptus Titanicus wanted two identical armies in their boxed starter set, to save on costs, and needed to explain why the two enemies looked so similar.
The fact that it is a game means that the best stories are the ones you tell yourselves. You buy, build and paint your miniatures yourself (players call them “plastic crack”: you always need just one more). Each game is a little story, using the 40K universe as a backdrop.
I think 40K fans are nervous about the Amazon deal. It’s easy to screw up this sort of thing. Look at the famously terrible 1995 Sylvester Stallone adaptation of Judge Dredd, which mistook its brutal, authoritarian protagonist for an action hero.
There are reasons to be hopeful. Henry Cavill, star of Superman and
The Witcher, has been recruited as executive producer and is likely to appear in it: he is, famously, an enormous fan.
Games Workshop itself is increasingly savvy about how to look after its intellectual property. But whatever happens, it has built a behemoth, through quietly making high-quality (and high-price) miniatures, all produced in Britain and creating compelling, if bleak and over-the-top, stories.
Remember that money your aunt left you? If you’d bought Google stock with it in December 2013, you would have about £5,000 now. If Apple, about £10,000. But if you’d wisely invested in Games Workshop PLC, you’d have £20,000, and could very nearly afford an entire Imperial Guard army. It’s a British success story, one which could only have grown out of the 1980s British satire boom, and one of which we should be proud.
The number of Games Workshop outlets in 20 countries, raking in nearly £400m in revenue a year
Tom Chivers is a science writer with ‘Semafor’