Sunday Musings - Computer Games Workshop

There cannot be many companies that have spent forty years accidentally succeeding quite as effectively as Games Workshop.

Now, before an army of lawyers descends from Nottingham armed with cease-and-desist notices and surprisingly well-painted Space Marines, it is worth clarifying that Games Workshop has always been exceptionally good at certain things. Creating worlds, for example. Selling tiny plastic soldiers to otherwise sensible adults. Convincing people that purchasing "just one more box" constitutes a reasonable financial decision. These are all areas in which the company has demonstrated an expertise bordering upon the supernatural.

Video games, however, were for many years a rather different matter.

This is perhaps surprising. Looking back from the vantage point of Dawn of War, Space Marine, Total War: Warhammer and the dozens upon dozens of successful digital adaptations that followed, it is easy to assume Games Workshop and video games were natural partners. The worlds certainly seemed ideal for the medium. Massive battles, colourful factions, memorable characters and enough lore to keep a thousand loading screens occupied for several centuries. It all appears perfectly obvious in hindsight.

The problem with hindsight, of course, is that it cheats.

The reality is that Games Workshop's relationship with video games often resembled two distant relatives forced to sit next to one another at a wedding. They were technically connected. They occupied the same room. Yet neither seemed entirely certain what they were supposed to say to each other.

Part of this stems from understanding what Games Workshop actually was during the 1980s. Today the company occupies a peculiar position in popular culture. It is simultaneously a hobby company, a miniature manufacturer, a publisher, a licensing giant and, increasingly, a custodian of intellectual properties recognised across the globe. During the early years, however, it was essentially a collection of enthusiastic nerds attempting to build a business around things they loved.

The important thing to remember is that Games Workshop emerged from tabletop gaming culture. This may sound obvious, but it shaped everything that followed. Tabletop gamers do not merely consume entertainment. They participate in it. The hobby is not the game. The hobby is painting, collecting, converting, reading, discussing and occasionally arguing over rules with the intensity usually reserved for constitutional crises.

Video games presented a problem.

They removed the hobby.

A digital Space Marine cannot be converted. A virtual goblin cannot be painted. No amount of clicking a mouse can recreate the peculiar mixture of pride and despair associated with accidentally gluing your fingers together while assembling cavalry.

For years, Games Workshop seemed genuinely uncertain how much of itself could survive the transition.

This uncertainty is visible throughout many of the early adaptations. Some were enjoyable. Some were ambitious. Some appeared to have escaped from a parallel universe in which game design was considered more of a loose suggestion than a discipline. The original Blood Bowl remains a personal favourite in this regard. Blood Bowl, as a tabletop game, thrives upon controlled chaos. As a video game, however, there were moments where one gained the distinct impression that the software itself had become confused regarding which team it was supporting.

Yet these games reveal something fascinating. Games Workshop consistently approached video games as though they were attempting to preserve the tabletop experience rather than create a digital one.

This is an understandable mistake.

It is also the same mistake made by countless licensed properties throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The assumption was that players wanted direct translations.

What they actually wanted was authenticity.

Those two things are not remotely the same.

Nobody truly wanted a perfect simulation of moving miniatures around a table. What they wanted was the feeling Warhammer generated. The atmosphere. The scale. The absurdity. The sensation of commanding genetically engineered super soldiers while cathedral-sized tanks rolled across battlefields for reasons known only to a deranged theologian.

Eventually somebody realised this.

And everything changed.

Dawn of War succeeded because it understood a fundamental truth that many previous adaptations had missed. It was not trying to recreate the tabletop game. It was trying to recreate the fantasy.

This distinction cannot be overstated.

Dawn of War does not play like Warhammer 40,000.

It feels like Warhammer 40,000.

The Space Marines behave as players imagine Space Marines should behave. The Orks are loud, violent and enthusiastic. Everything explodes with appropriate theatricality. It captures the emotional reality of the setting rather than its mechanical reality.

This was arguably the moment Games Workshop's approach to licensing matured.

The company stopped asking, "How do we turn our game into a video game?"

Instead, it began asking, "What kind of video game best expresses our universe?"

The difference was transformative.

Ironically, the lesson mirrored something hobbyists had understood for decades. The appeal of Warhammer has never resided solely within its rules. If it did, nobody would spend hundreds of hours painting miniatures. Nobody would write army backgrounds. Nobody would construct elaborate terrain boards resembling medieval cities, industrial wastelands or giant floating mushrooms.*

The hobby works because people become invested in worlds.

The games merely provide excuses to visit them.

Once Games Workshop embraced this philosophy, the floodgates opened. Suddenly Warhammer could become a real-time strategy game, an MMO, an action game, a tactical game or a roleplaying game. The format mattered less than the atmosphere. Developers were trusted to build experiences that felt authentic rather than literal.

In many ways, Games Workshop's digital success emerged from an act of confidence. The company finally accepted that its greatest strength was not the rules it published, but the worlds it had created.

Looking back, there is something wonderfully appropriate about this. After all, Warhammer itself was built from borrowed inspirations transformed into something uniquely its own. Why should its video games be any different?

The plastic soldiers still march across tabletops. The paint still dries. The dice still betray us at the worst possible moment. Yet somewhere along the way, Games Workshop discovered that the soul of its hobby could survive outside the tabletop.

It merely needed the right people to translate it.

*The giant floating mushrooms usually make more sense than the rules discussions that follow them.