T I T A N O M A N C Y

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.