Âåðñèÿ äëÿ ïå÷àòè òåìû

After acquiring control of Games Workshop, Ansell decided to consolidate both companies in Citadel’s home of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire. The decision didn’t go down well with many of Games Workshop’s existing staff in London.

“It was presented at the time as a merger,” said Priestley, “but really it was a takeover by Citadel.

But while recent editions of the game have cast them in a heroic light, Priestley argued that Games Workshop had misinterpreted the intent behind the characters.

“To me the background to 40K was always intended to be ironic,” he said.

“The fact that the Space Marines were lauded as heroes within Games Workshop always amused me, because they’re brutal, but they’re also completely self-deceiving. The whole idea of the Emperor is that you don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. The whole Imperium might be running on superstition. There’s no guarantee that the Emperor is anything other than a corpse with a residual mental ability to direct spacecraft.

“Tom had to borrow a lot of money to buy the business,” Priestley said. “That meant we had to grow the company very quickly.

“I thought that one way to do that would be to expand the product line, so you’d have Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, then this series of games that would let you explore the universe at a much closer, more detailed level.

“But it ended up being one of the great dividing points of Games Workshop. We’d grown internationally at a very fast pace, and we had to deal with French, Spanish, Italian versions of the games. The print runs of the foreign language editions were always bigger than we could sell, and after several near-disasters where we’d printed way too many of something, GorkaMorka being a classic example, we’d nearly bankrupted the company.”

The financial scare spooked management, Priestley said, leading to a change in Games Workshop’s culture.

“The studio, the creative part of Games Workshop, had always been kept apart from the sales part of it. One thing Bryan said was that if the sales people got to be in charge of the studio, it would destroy the studio, and that’s exactly what happened.”

“The model design for Warhammer had started to get overblown,” he said.

“The models started to get big and came with too many parts. The number of pieces and the size of design are key factors in the cost of production, and there was a lack of discipline that meant the models were becoming less profitable.

“But the reason it became a problem for Games Workshop was that the sales divisions, which had been given a huge degree of autonomy and political power, suddenly found they had hugely overblown organisations. They had the staff, but none of them could actually sell anything – they were used to people just coming in and buying stuff. So the success of the Lord of the Rings ended up being a failure in the company’s eyes because they lost control of it, which always pissed me off.”

“I was the head of the creative department, and they weren’t doing anything creative any more,” he said.

“The role I had in the studio was with staff working on game development and design, and they’d pretty much decided that game development and design wasn’t of any interest to them. The current attitude in Games Workshop is that they’re not a games company, it’s that they’re a model company selling collectibles. That’s something I find wholly self-deceiving and couldn’t possibly agree with.”

“It’s an entirely fresh game system. It’s gameplay-oriented and it’s designed for forces as small as 20 or 30 models a side up to hundreds. There are four factions out immediately with more planned for the future. There are plans to make plastic miniatures and all sorts of things. It’s a game with a future, which I don’t think 40K is.”

Nowadays White Dwarf is published in a smaller, weekly format. It’s more attractively designed, far more colourful and makes much more effective use of photography and illustration. But it’s little more than a marketing device for Games Workshop products, and much of its charm and sense of community is gone.

“We worked hard to build up Dungeons & Dragons, but ultimately it wasn’t ours,” said Livingstone, “so in the end we were working for someone else.

“We started asking ourselves what the point was of promoting other peoples’ products when we didn’t own them. We began to feel that we’d be better off developing our own intellectual property, creating value for ourselves rather than somebody else and having control over our own future.”

For the most part, roleplay gamers bought one model at a time. They played single characters in long-running campaigns, and that meant they could go for years without needing to buy more miniatures.

Ansell decided that a more lucrative approach would be to emulate the historical wargaming business, where customers bought entire armies at a time, ordering tens or even hundreds of figures and generating far greater profits.

To make that happen, Games Workshop would need to publish a new game – a radical departure from its previous offerings. Ansell turned to designers Richard Halliwell and Rick Priestley to produce a set of rules for full-scale battles that would appeal to die-hard fantasy roleplayers.

It was to be called Warhammer, and it was destined to become one of the biggest success stories in all of gaming.

À ÷òî óäèâèëî?