We're going to be doing this more often, you know.
John Blanche died this week, as reported by fellow former Games Workshop alum Trish Carden, passing away at the age of 78. Intensely private in his personal life - his birthday is observed in "late October" - details of his passing are understandably scarce. Although he retired a few years ago owing to poor health, I hope that his ultimate end was a peaceful one untroubled by sickness or infirmity.
I had the unique pleasure of meeting Blanche in a professional capacity, once, and he was precisely the sort of gregarious weirdo that one might assume from his work. Though our acquaintance was brief, it was one of the highlights of my association with Games Workshop.
In many ways, Blanche is synonymous with Warhammer - throughout much of Games Workshop's golden age in the 1990s, it was Blanche's art which formed people's first impressions of the setting and served as the initial hook to draw them into the grim darkness of the far future. It's certainly what hooked me.
His influence on the 40k aesthetic cannot be understated and is still felt, today, in ways both subtle and gross. In celebration of Blanche's life, take a moment to appreciate some of my favorite pieces of his.
It is ironic that this creature, whose will extends to over a million worlds, is now unable to leave the life-giving machinery of his imperial throne, unable to so much as lift a shrivelled finger or twitch a shrunken eye. The living carcass of the Emperor is immobile, held fast within the bio-machine that sustains his spirit. The mass of this machine is contained within the imperial palace; room upon room of twisted technology, pulsing with a life and will of its own - living, breathing, reproducing and writhing like a giant, mindless organism. Held within this perversion of science lies the Emperor himself, or rather what now remains of his carcass, the seat of his omnipotent will.
One of the things that's always irked me about the wider Warhammer community is the credulity with which some among it treat the most outrageous, unfounded and, most importantly, unsourced anecdotes. I'm not talking about rumor and speculation like the long-prophesied Return to Armageddon (predicted on this very blog eight years ago!), but unhinged conjecture like how StarCraft was supposed to be a Warhammer game.
That's right, it's finally time to talk about the alleged Blizzard break-up.
First, a bit of context: the '90s were a long time ago and while a lot of us were there for them, many more of you were not. People take for granted things they're told by people they trust and so there's this whole phenomenon of Warhammer oral history, uncritically passed down from grogs to newbs over generations of hobbyists.
So it was in the summer of 2007 when StarCraft II was announced, and I observed a fellow redshirt telling some unattended game store kid that, yeah, StarCraft's cool and all, but that's only because it was supposed to be a 40k game.
You see, in the mythology of Games Workshop, any sufficiently similar competitor was a rogue licensee or a failed partnership that - owing entirely to the perfidy of the other party - just ditched the branding and brought their copyright infringing product to market without the Games Workshop logo or due royalties paid; and as litigious as Games Workshop has always been, they just never seemed to have the legal wherewithal to put a stop to it.
Now, this was demonstrably untrue at the time and would become more so in the years that followed, but it sure sounded plausible if you'd heard it from someone that ought to know (not that redshirts actually knew much of anything at all, but Games Workshop sure liked to act as if we were the face of the brand) - after all, Andy Chambers was writing it! And he'd written for 40k. Coincidence?
If you're pre-primed to believe that the two are connected, then the connections are easy to see. Terrans? Space Marines, they both wear powered armor, never mind that Robert Heinlein came up with the idea for elite infantry that fought from ships in mechanically assisted, environmentally sealed armor in 1959. Protoss? The ancient warrior race of genetically engineered super-psychics that are into crystals and shit? Obviously Eldar. And don't even get me started on Zerg! They're just Tyranids with the name scratched off!
Yes, everyone was just ripping off Games Workshop - especially Michael Moorcock and Frank Herbert - and Blizzard was the latest disloyal licensee to breach their contract.
Except that StarCraft was already the fourth in an established series, following 1996's WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness and its expansion, Beyond the Dark Portal, which was itself the sequel to 1994's WarCraft: Orcs & Humans, which was the first game released under the Blizzard banner but was by no means that studio's first game; they had previously released games under the name Silicon & Synapse and, briefly, Chaos Studios before being acquired by Davidson & Associates - which, if you're a '90s kid, you probably recognize mostly for edutainment titles like Math Blaster (but not Carmen Sandiego or the Oregon Trail, that was Brøderbund).
So WarCraft must have been a Warhammer game, right? It's got orcs! They're green! Only Games Workshop had green orcs!
But Games Workshop's orcs were just D&D orcs - literally, as GW started off as the UK distributor for TSR products in the 1970s and '80s and Citadel Miniatures was originally founded to sell fantasy roleplaying miniatures in service of that business.
In fact, Games Workshop's take on orcs wasn't even the first to depart from the 1977 pigman look found in the D&D Monster Manual - American studio Grenadier Models had already established the green brute archetype as early as 1982 with their Orc's Lair figure set, a full year before Warhammer Fantasy Battles' first edition.
Far from being unique to the Warhammer brand, this was the visual conception of the orc that would characterize fantasy fiction for much of the '80s and '90s, including the 1983 Dungeons & Dragons animated series - so that when WarCraft eventually hit the market in 1994, it was plainly apparent which was the orc and which was the human.
But, still, it's similar, right? There must be some kind of connection! Well, you're right, but it's precisely the kind of connection that Warhammer has with Dune and Elric of Melniboné; inspiration.
In 2012, online nerd tabloid Kotaku ran a retrospective with WarCraft director Patrick Wyatt in which he provided his firsthand account of the game's development in 1993 from its genesis as a solo effort to the accretion of a full-fledged development team following the studio's acquisition in February, 1994. In this article, the subject of Games Workshop's relationship to Blizzard is directly addressed:
Allen Adham hoped to obtain a license to the Warhammer universe to try to increase sales by brand recognition. Warhammer was a huge inspiration for the art-style of Warcraft, but a combination of factors, including a lack of traction on business terms and a fervent desire on the part of virtually everyone else on the development team (myself included) to control our own universe nixed any potential for a deal. We had already had terrible experiences working with DC Comics on “Death and Return of Superman” and “Justice League Task Force”, and wanted no similar issues for our new game.
Now, to me, this reads an awful lot like the abortive ideation of an executive that was otherwise uninvolved in the project which never got anywhere near a formal license agreement, especially if the rest of the team was already aligned against it and their recent past experiences with licensed properties had been so awful, but the bottom line is that Blizzard didn't need the Warhammer IP; orcs were already a fantasy fiction staple and the game would not have been materially enhanced by access to place names and characters from the Warhammer world.
It was arguably better off without. Unencumbered by licensing obligations to adhere strictly to approved depictions of Games Workshop's brand, Blizzard was able to rapidly iterate and innovate, with the more expansive WarCraft II introducing air and sea combat - mechanics it would not have been permitted to include with Warhammer's strict regimental combat focus - and its competition with Westwood Studios' Command & Conquer series driving a boom of real-time strategy titles amid a burgeoning multiplayer scene in the mid-'90s.
So by the time that StarCraft was in development in 1996, any hypothetical need for Games Workshop's imprimatur was long since rendered moot. Blizzard Entertainment and the WarCraft brand had a strong enough reputation that StarCraft was highly anticipated in its own right. The monthly gaming magazines - rags like Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer, for those that remember print - ran glossy multi-page previews in an era before widespread internet made ready access to development updates easy to come by, and pre-social media chat rooms and web forums were abuzz.
When it was released in 1998 - six months before the third edition of Warhammer 40,000 - StarCraft sold 1.5 million copies, and it would go on to sell another eight million copies in the years to follow, trading entirely on the strength of its own brand and going on to become the most influential real-time strategy game of all time.
And while there had been Warhammer licensed games in the '90s like Space Hulk, Final Liberation and Chaos Gate, It wouldn't be until 2004's Dawn of War that 40k broke containment in a meaningful way; and even then, that likely owes less to the strength of the Warhammer license - which was still fairly niche to the tabletop wargaming space - than to the pedigree of the developer; Relic Entertainment was responsible for the groundbreaking Homeworld in 1999 and its 2003 sequel, as well as the lesser known but still successful Impossible Creatures before tackling 40k, following their acquisition by THQ.
It's likely Dawn of War's success which was responsible for spreading the Blizzard break-up rumors so widely; the game became a major onboarding point for new players to the tabletop, but even with four million units sold, it was impossible for Dawn of War to escape the long shadow StarCraft cast over the rest of the genre. In the absence of official messaging, Games Workshop retail employees took it upon themselves to dismiss StarCraft as a ripoff whenever it came up in connection with 40k.
The irony of it is that there's more direct evidence that 40k ripped off StarCraft than the other way around; while both games owe a great deal to Starship Troopers and Alien, when the time came for Games Workshop to reboot the Space Marine range in 2017, there were some difficult to dismiss parallels between the new Primaris Aggressors and Inceptors, and their StarCraft counterparts, Marauders and Reapers.
Ultimately, it's the disingenuity of the accusation that's most galling. Warhammer has always been a kitchen sink of a setting that has unashamedly appropriated concepts and characters from other sources, dressing them up in the baroque cruft of the 41st millennium and attempting to pass it as an original idea. In many ways, part of the charm was in the earnestness of it (what if Rambo but 40k?), but it seems to have bred in a certain sensitivity to comparison; especially where that comparison is not especially flattering.
I'm personally excited for StarCraft tabletop, but I'm under no illusions that it's going to displace 40k as the preeminent science fiction tabletop wargame. Somewhat less sanguine about the people that have made their enthusiasm for Warhammer a substitute for personality, though; they seem to be on the defensive and are once again out there spreading misinformation. But now, at least, you'll know better.
It's only taken twenty-one years, but Ciaphas Cain is finally getting a new miniature after Aly Morrison's 2005 sculpt for Black Library's incredibly limited run of promotional models. A classic, but twenty-one years is still twenty-one years. Big improvement all the way around.
Keep on mogging that generic Commissar, lads. We're up to four better alternatives so far.
The IP Ogors™ strike again, this time taking down purveyor of proxy space pests Hydracast Miniatures.
I've been asked on more than a couple of occasions why I run defense for IP infringers - after all, doesn't Games Workshop have an obligation to protect its copyrights or risk losing them? Maybe, but we're not talking about dilution of a unique brand name like bandaids or xerox machines - we're talking about the unique artistic expression of a sculptor which happens to depict a work of fiction, not a counterfeit of an actual Games Workshop product.
Whether you like them or not, small studios like Hydracast - or Ghamak, Tortuga Bay, Tiny Legend and others too numerous to name - are entirely within their rights to sell their own work because copyright only protects the work at question, not a look or aesthetic; and none of them are selling recasts of Games Workshop's products, a fact which Games Workshop has been reminded whenever it's brought before the courts.
But it's a lot easier to go after garage studios that don't have the financial resources to duke it out in court. Chapterhouse benefitted immensely from pro bono representation by one of the premier white shoe law firms in the upper midwest, but without the considerable dollar value of free billable hours worked by Winston & Strawn, Games Workshop might well have bowled them over just like every other solo act without a hundred thousand dollars to burn. You don't see them going after Microsoft for Zerg or Sony for Terminids, for instance, but God forbid you should be a freelance sculptor with your own take on the all-consuming swarm of hyper-evolved interstellar locusts.
And if they did, I'd run defense for Microsoft and Sony, too.
The new scenery looks great and there's even a cheeky little warbike reveal for the Ork enthusiasts in the audience, but I viscerally hate this. This is a slippery slope moment, the first loose scree underfoot before the long fall to pre-painted models because some bean counter thinks it will be more accessible to more potential customers.
I don't like the idea of de-hobbifying the hobby. I oppose it and I don't think any good can come from it.
I could have sworn I'd posted about Thunderhead Studio's excellent and legally distinct "Recursor Coffinmech" before, but it turns out it's been sitting unpublished in my drafts for the last three years because the IP Ogors™ C&D'd it so quick that it was already offline before I could hit publish.
Can't imagine why.
Anyway, they're still updating it and if you're especially clever you can still find the files somewhere out there on the internet. As I've mentioned, this is the objectively correct way to do a bigger dreadnought and I sincerely hope that GW gives the Redemptor the Land Speeder treatment sooner than later.
The other day I threatened to share my thoughts on Games Workshop's ongoing pivot away from all-new, all-different Primaris Marine units like Aggressors, Inceptors and Suppressors (oh, my!) towards Primarisized versions of classic Space Marine units like Scouts, Terminators and Assault Marines, and since time is a construct and a deep dive into a product released almost a decade ago is as pertinent now as it was in 2018, we're going to talk about it. Put on your long pants, we're going deep into the weeds.
Before we can talk about Primaris, though, we need to talk about the things that lead to Primaris - and as is so frequently the case, it's no one thing. There were all kinds of considerations ranging from macroeconomic factors like the lasting impact of the 2008 financial crisis to more intimate stories of hubris like the self-inflicted collateral damage of Games Workshop Limited v. Chapterhouse Studios LLC completely upending GW's practice of releasing rules without models and opening the floodgates to third party bits manufacturers that had already become emboldened by the increasing accessibility of 3d printing - but the largest single factor was probably the maturity of the Space Marine product range.
By the 2010s, almost all of the miniatures in the Space Marine range were plastic, with the only remaining holdouts being individual models for which the economy of scale made the value proposition of injection mold tooling more limited; and even then, an increasing number of generic characters were getting plastic clampacks so that it was only named characters and certain underperforming specialists like Techmarines with Thunderfire Cannon, which many collectors might not even have one of.
The core Space Marine range had been basically unchanged since 1998 when III Edition introduced the multipart plastic Tactical Squad, and with the subsequent releases of multipart plastic Assault Marines and Devastators employing the same interchangeable template, along with chapter-specific variants and upgrades for Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, and Black Templar (to say nothing of Chaos Space Marines), the range had basically achieved maturity. There wasn't really anything "new" to sell Space Marine collectors.
That was until the Stormraven Gunship for Blood Angels and Grey Knights arrived on February 5th, 2011, and all of a sudden Space Marine collectors were falling all over themselves to add it to their armies, even if it wasn't a legal unit at that time. Whether Games Workshop took that to be a sign that Space Marine players were ready for new models and fast-tracked a gaggle of new kits for VI Edition, or if VI Edition's glut of toyetic new units were already in the pipeline is now only a matter of conjecture but more than that, it was time to force everyone to buy new Tactical Squads.
The sixth edition of Warhammer 40,000 launched in the summer of 2012 and along with it, the execrable phenomenon of grav spam; a new and exciting weapon system for a new edition of the game that basically invalidated every Space Marine army that didn't include them. The brand new Centurions were rocking three(!) grav cannon, and both Tactical and Devastator Squads were updated and repackaged to include lesser grav weapons of their own.
Whether this was a successful sales ploy or not is hard to say, because Games Workshop's financial performance during the time was not great. VI Edition was superseded by VII in less than two years, at that time the shortest turnaround for an edition since the 1970s. No doubt some competitive players were induced to chase the meta of grav spam while it was in ascendance, but the competitive scene alone can't drive sales. Given that the contemporaneously released Hunter/Stalker anti-aircraft tank performed so poorly that it's just plain been discontinued, today, I think it's probably fair to say that VI Space Marines didn't meet expectations. This is borne out by Games Workshop's own regulatory reporting because by the first half of fiscal 2015, their year-over-year sales were down by more than six and a half percent.
Meanwhile, a number of other consequential products were already in the production pipeline. Warhammer Fantasy Battles had been on a generational slump following the release of Island of Blood in 2010 and the decision to axe the brand had been made well before this point - we know from primary sources that Age of Sigmar was deep in double secret development as of 2014. The summer 2015 rollout of AoS would go on to be disastrously mismanaged by a marketing team with, at that time, no social media presence; and when it was finally revealed, GW sought to heap insult upon injury by replacing the iconic '90s Space Marine in the Warhammer World parking lot with a Stormcast Liberator, doubling down on the core conceit that Sigmarines were to be the face of the brand going forward.
It's not much of a leap to infer that the introduction of Stormcast would be the inception of Primaris Marines, although I personally doubt that Gathering Storm was ever intended to be the same kind of universe-ending debacle as End Times. Nonetheless, Age of Sigmar did sell, outperforming WFB's sales in the year prior to its launch, and a lot of the same impulses that drove the development of AoS are observable in Dark Imperium; including the desire to move the story forward from the pseudohistorical stasis the setting had existed in since Eye of Terror in 2003 - so no wonder that they would go back to that event for a do-over in order to advance the clock.
At the same time, the scale of Space Marines was already creeping in the form of 2016's Deathwatch: Overkill and the multipart Deathwatch Kill Team kit to follow, and the initially Japan-exclusive Space Marine Heroes.
These taller, better proportioned models still broadly adhered to the template first laid down in 1998 and provide a brief glimpse into a future that might have been if not for AoS - but as we'll discuss shortly, they would have been too far along their respective development cycles to simply shelve, even if the Space Marine range was about to take a hard turn which would render them redundant; and at least Space Marine Heroes would go on to be repurposed in a series of Target and Barnes & Noble exclusives.
(We won't be discussing Betrayal at Calth or Burning of Prospero, because while those models were great, Forge World and boxed games were different business units at that time and weren't really representative of the broader arc of 40k as a brand)
Now, that's a lot of prologue (and we're not done, yet), but it's necessary to contextualize what's about to happen; because between the underperformance of VII's new Space Marines and the success of Stormcast Eternals, it was inevitable that Games Workshop would try to catch that lightning again. If redesigning Space Marines for fantasy could spike fantasy's sales, imagine what it could do for 40k where they were already popular!
But lessons had been learned and simply replacing the old models wouldn't do. Grav spam had already demonstrated that nobody's going to rush out and buy replacements for their old models, these were to be new Space Marines. You can have both! And, in fact, you should. Intercessors were explicitly not Tactical Squads, nor were Inceptors analogous to Assault Squads or Aggressors to Terminators. The Repulsor would not replace the Land Raider, nor the Redemptor Dreadnought replace its diminutive Castraferrum predecessor.
They were just better Space Marines. Bigger and more impressive than the retroactively renamed Firstborn Space Marines, both on the tabletop and in the meta but don't worry, the messaging was keen to communicate, nothing's going anywhere! Your Firstborn are safe, they're just mechanically inferior.
This promotional sleight of hand was unambiguously intended to avoid a repeat of the spectacular crashouts that accompanied WFB's discontinuation and enable GW to continue double-dipping on Firstborn while Primaris were expanded out with additional kits over the course of the edition - and initially, it worked. The reception wasn't bad. Generally positive, even.
Inceptors traded extremely heavily on their resemblance to Rogue Trader artwork of Space Marines with jump packs and Aggressors were celebrated as what Centurions should have been in the first place. There were few complaints, if any, about Intercessors or Hellblasters. Reivers were there, too. The gambit had worked, and while there would be a few leftovers from the previous generation of Space Marines to make their way to market in the form of commemorative series models and collectibles, Primaris were the future of the Space Marine range from 2017, on, and there were plenty of new kits in the pipeline.
Which, finally, brings us to Shadowspear. I know, it's been a journey.
As I observed at the time, the additional Phobos Armour "Vanguard" Marines added some much-needed variety to what had been a fairly uneventful first two years of the Primaris range. Unsurprising, perhaps, because the new edition had necessitated completely rewriting every single published Codex, although it's entirely possible that GW had been hedging on the relaunch's success and only moved into production with additional Primaris kits once Dark Imperium was well received.
Unfortunately, they took precisely the wrong lesson from VII's success and doubled down on weird and toyetic designs for the big second wave. Unlike the Gravis Armour Inceptors with which they shared a battlefield role, the Phobos Armour Suppressors were totally unprecedented and couldn't claim to represent a cohesive vision of the Space Marine range with a pedigree stretching back to Rogue Trader. They just looked goofy, flying around on their moon shoes and anti-gravity fins.
To this day, these models have still not received a multipart kit, and in fact are currently unavailable in any form which leads me to believe that someone in a position of responsibility probably recognized that they weren't likely to be well received. Eliminators didn't get held back, for instance.
And while the Suppressors likely weren't solely responsible for it (an uncompetitive price point may also have been a factor), Shadowspear wound up sitting on the shelves at Warhammer stores long enough that its unsold copies would eventually end up in as overstock and returned to distribution. This would be a problem because the rest of the year was to be supporting releases of various Vanguard-adjacent models including the equally ridiculous Invictor Warsuit. By December, it's clear a decision had been made to open up some narrative distance from the release because this image was "leaked" for Christmas.
Don't misunderstand, leaks do happen from time to time - Primaris Marines had been leaked, in fact, when one of Games Workshop's contract painters posted a picture of the Dark Imperium Sergeant months before the new edition was announced. Potato cam photos can emerge from manufacturing partners, as happened with Speed Freeks, or influencer program participants can break their NDAs, as was the case with the Nightbringer, and occasionally something juicy gets discarded in a very publicly accessible waste bin, but in most cases, GW is generally pretty able to keep a secret.
This was not that. This was a carefully cropped and intentionally mosaiced portion of a larger image, not an out-of-focus photograph of someone's screen, prominently featuring a miniature that wouldn't be officially announced for another nine months.
More than that, for all its artfully intentional obfuscation there was no missing the fact that it depicted updated bikes and speeders - classic Space Marine kits, not the all-new, all-different Primaris vehicles released up to that point.
These undoubtedly would have already been well at the end of their development cycle when Shadowspear dropped, but were among half a dozen other new kits due to arrive with VIII Edition the following year. Teasing these, specifically - rather than, say, the Invader ATV and Firestrike Servo-Turret - seems very much like it was intended to put updates to those Firstborn models front of mind and move the conversation away from the second wave release.
And so we arrive, finally, at my theory. I think that the reception of Shadowspear and the second wave of Primaris Space Marines was so poor that it forced Games Workshop to completely change direction going into Indomitus, delaying and de-prioritizing risky new kits like Desolators and accelerating the development of updates to the classic range kits like Scouts and Terminators to headline the subsequent edition. Where it was too late to pull the plug, no additional effort would be spent to bring a kit to market and if that meant they'd remain as push-fit starter set models like the Primaris Outriders did, so be it.
I should stress, none of this is informed by any inside information. It may be completely off base; I'm not personally acquainted with anyone in a decision-making position at Games Workshop and I sincerely doubt they'd disclose anything significant to me if I was - but I'm confident in my analysis and I hope that by spelling it out in autistic detail, you can see how it makes sense given what has occurred to date.
There are still things that irk me about the Primaris range and I expect that they always will, but Games Workshop has at least demonstrated that it can follow sales trends even if they would rather not hear from their loudest and most obnoxious customers directly. I doubt very much that Gravis or Phobos Armour are going anywhere, but at this point they really don't need to; the pivot away from Primaris seems by all accounts to have been a great success and I'm generally happy with what we've gotten from it.
Vostroyan Firstborn are coming back as a limited Made to Order for the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of Medusa V.
I'll just let that sink in for a moment, for all the olds in the audience.
It's been a few years since the last time these molds were spun up and if you're a Horus Heresy enthusiast, they remain the absolute best miniatures for representing Imperial Army infantry. Upland Tercio, ho!
While our Commonwealth friends continue to get it from GW's IP Ogors™, contested former Soviet satellite states along the Russian frontier continue to give no fucks for intellectual property law and I am here for it. Become ungovernable.
