PUTTING THE HAMMER DOWN

Warhammer's unstoppable rise within the videogame universe

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Though at its core, Games Workshop produces games for the tabletop, its history is tightly bound with videogames. It was, after all, co-founded in 1975 by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, who both went on to help define the UK videogame industry. Computer platforms seemed natural offshoots for its physical games, starting in 1983 with Apocalypse for Sinclair's ZX Spectrum. It even published original games, such as Julian Gollop's acclaimed 1985 turn-based strategy, Chaos: The Battle Of Wizards.

Warhammer itself started to be reflected in videogames from the early 1990s, with the release of games based on HeroQuest, Space Crusade and Space Hulk. Over the past few years, though, the number of licensed Warhammer games has exploded, just as Warhammer itself has. In the five years between 2017 and 2021, as Games Workshop's stock price rose by a factor of ten, 38 games based on Warhammer were released, contrasting with nine released across all of the 'oos. The spread of genres is wide, from firstperson shooters (Necromunda: Hired Gun) to mobile CCGs (Combat Cards), arcade flight sims (Dakka Squadron) to ARPGs (Inquisitor: Martyr), and so is the quality level, but the list is studded with gems, such as the Total War: Warhammer series, Mechanicus, and of course Fatshark's Vermintide.

That breadth reflects the breadth of Warhammer itself, according to Jon Gillard, Games Workshop's executive vice president of global licensing. "Originally we worked with a very limited number of partners who released a small number of games," he says. "One of the difficulties from that time was that we only got to explore a tiny portion of the, frankly, massive multi-universe Warhammer IP, so the biggest change since then is that we have opened up Warhammer to a larger number of partners to try out a number of different genres of game on a wider range of platforms."