AD 1989: GW's finest hour?

By their very nature 'Golden Ages' are subjective creatures immersed as they are in nostalgia, whimsy and pure pigheadishness. And has been noted many, many times before (perhaps most eloquently by Matthew Sullivan) the beginning of any downward spiral will depend on your own personal set of values. The moment in time when YOU believe a rock group, football club or even, dare I say, a British miniatures company ascended to the very heavens and reached their peak. After that moment, you have the slow decline where innovation is replaced with refinement and finally, sigh, repetition.

But this post is not going to be concerning itself with when and where GW's Golden Age should be situated, instead I am going to pinpoint a single year (in this case 1989) as the company's finest hour and rather than just belligerently shouting it from the rooftops as some lesser commentators may do, I am actually going to prove it!

What follows are sixteen different pieces of evidence that I hope will sustain my argument. You, dear reader, are of course perfectly entitled to disagree with me and that is absolutely fine. Of course, if you DO disagree I really do hope you can enlighten me with a differing year in with GW reached their creative peak. The comments section is eagerly awaiting your opinion!

Okay, let's get cracking with...

16) Troll Games

Perhaps its something about the outlandish boardgame titles, the brightly illustrated components or the totally bizarre music tapes but I just can't help adore the old Troll games. They were obviously aimed at a much younger audience than GW's usual fare and for some years were a bit of a mystery. I mean, what inspired the prime miniatures company in the world to produce little card games in the first place? Thankfully, Rick Priestley cleared things up when RoC80s discussed these games in 2013. 

"IIRC the Troll Games were one of our periodic attempts to produce games for customers like WH Smiths, Woolworths, and such. I believe it was Andy Jones (GW licensing last I heard) who created and produced the games at our studio on Low Pavement. The artist was Bil Sedgewick as far as I remember. The tapes were put together by and feature Andy Jones and Tony Cotterill (now Forgeworld) and assorted GW musical talent I imagine!"

Why include them on this list? Well, GW was still a functioning games company who actually produced new games for enthusiasts like us to play in 1989! Also, the daft songs on the tapes are very much in keeping with the zany Warhammer vibe that is evident in much of the later 1980s and my two children love listening to them to this day, finding words like 'bum' and 'pants' evidently slices of comedy gold. If you are intrigued at all about these notorious tunes you can experience them here, here, here and here. 

Enjoy! 

15) Goblin Fanatics

Next up we have Blood Bowl, then already on its second edition and coupled with the well loved astrogranite pitch. Now goblin fanatics had already appeared in Warhammer, but the crazy game of fantasy football was the perfect arena to develop them further. I can remember laughing out loud the first time I saw the pogostick wielding gobbos printed in White Dwarf and appreciated the humourous touches in the printed articles. Though based on a very American sport, GW's take is packed with a very British attitude. 

Of course, Kev Adams had a big role to play developing some of this insanity. He'd knock up wild and wacky models faster than the writers could produce background and rules for them. 

https://sho3box.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/clogheen-cannibals-goblins.jpg

Pete Knifton's cartoon style illustrations really helped bring the concept of these maniacal green loons to life, and his artwork remains (in my opinion) the best Blood Bowl has ever had. The storytelling in many of these pictures (see above) often sold both the concept and the model to me before I ever saw the miniature. 

The goblin fanatics remain a hilarious idea for a wargames figure. They perhaps epitomise the comic creativity of Citadel during the later part of the 1980s.

14) Bolt Thrower album and tour

Grinding death metal and a game of Warhammer sadly no longer have anything to do with each other. They fell out around 1991 or so I have heard. Today, the corporate blandness of GW seems a million miles away from the world of R'n'R but in the year 1989 the company's association with heavy thrashing noises was only just beginning. If you are interested in learning more about GW's curious past with music then look no further than these articles from this humble blog. 

Sadly I never attended any of the Grindcrusher Tour's shows but I have met a couple chaps who did and the very thought of Citadel Miniatures and games for sale at thrash metal gig is now incredible. But apparently, it did actually happen. In 1989. 

13) Genestealer Cult

I spoke earlier on about GW's incredible creativity around this time. The ideas seem to have been coming thick and fast and one that really stands out for me in 1989 is the genestealer cult stuff. Not only were the hybrid models outstanding sculpts, their background and paint jobs were also first rate. I can remember spending hours pouring over the detail wondering how it was even possible to paint a model that well (I still think this way in fact) and I always take a few minutes to appreciate the old models whenever I am at the Wargames Foundry. 

White Dwarf published loads of very memorable background and rules supplements for the cults and looking at them once again, they are excellent. So good in fact, modern GW had to do twenty-first century versions rather recently. Looking at the modern kits I can honestly say they are easily some of the finest models to come out of their stables in many, many years. Yet, they were designed and developed in 1989!

For further information, have a read of the wonderful Steve Casey's work on the hybrids, with many photographs taken of Bryan Ansell's collection.   

12) Wardancers

Though the models depicted here are from 1987 (I have discussed them before) this little section is concerned with the glorious background material and adventure ideas published in White Dwarf. A supplement for WFRP, with plenty of scope for porting to games of WFB3, remains a vivid and magical adventure, with more than a few splashes of extreme Warhammer violence thrown in. 

I won't spoil the nature of the adventure or the fluff in the two articles published in WD 111 and 112, I'll save that for another time, but their inclusion into the 1980s Warhammer mythos was incredible, at least to me and my WFRP friends. 

We all stopped playing our version of the Enemy Within and began a short campaign around the forests of Loren. Generating wardancer characters was a very memorable experience, having previously been heavily focused on playing human type characters. Our GM at the time was called Daniel and he was two of three years older than us, he was on the cusp of starting at Cambridge and his intellect and experience really brought the forest world to life. It was captivating!

Now you are probably wondering how I can argue that the wardancers articles are vital to the 1989 GW peak, aren't you? Well we need to look beyond my personal experiences and look at the bigger picture. Not only were the articles very well written and designed, they were totally unique to anything WFRP had done before (or would again, if you like). The artwork that supported the supplement was also outstanding and penned by British fantasy legend, Russ Nicholson. His pen and ink battle scenes have never been bettered. 

Not so long ago I wrote a blogpost about Women in Warhammer and missed a trick, failing to mention the wardancers in the article. Here we have male and female warriors living on an equal footing and dare I say bare female breasts appearing in White Dwarf! Inconceivable today! Not that Nicholson's work is in any way gratuitous, reminding me of the way ancient cultures depict the human body in a natural, matter of fact way. 

The art and background material of the wardancers show a depth of culture and sophistication that would seldom be seen again. The two articles remain an unique and original piece of work to this day. 

11) Marienburg

Reading White Dwarf back in '89 was the single source of GW background material save the published hardback supplements (which were expensive). So for many of us, our monthly fix was an essential part of our hobby lives. To millennials (who's lives have been augmented by the internet) this dirth of information and the lack of almost instant gratification is very hard to understand. Marienburg was essential reading in 1989, if you were a fantasy fan at the very least. Each month, if we were lucky, we got to explore a tiny part of the Old World in exquisite detail and the articles put out by Flame were often my first port of call when picking up the magazine. 

Though some of the artwork appearing alongside the articles was old, such as this classic image by Stephen Tappin, much of it was brand new and produced in such grimy detail by Tony Ackland, it brought the Old World setting to life like nothing else. And remember, the Old World of 1989 was a far more realistic (and therefore easier to identify with) than the paper thin cartoony substance that came later. 

The scratchy, grubby look of many of the illustrations marked a world that really did seem grim and perilous as it was so closely related to our own. The more fantastical the setting became, the less and less I found I was truly identifying with the themes and characters. Too many of them became too two dimensional (that is a lot of toos!) and less sophisticated. 

Marienburg was a monthly excursion to another place; a place dark and dangerous, which gave Warhammer some of it's truly dark and macabre moments. Nothing else ever came close to expanding the background of the game (at least in a single city location) with such care, depth and skill. 

Legendary, in a time of legends. 

10) Marauder Chaos Dwarfs 

At the time in question, I thought the Marauder minatures line a bit off. They were different in style than the Citadel models I loved so much, and had a chunkier, more heroic look to them. Subsequently, no of my hard earned cash was ever dished out to buy up any of the ranges. In hindsight, this was a mistake as there are some truly exceptional models in the pantheon, which have gone on to excite and enthrall modern day Oldhammerers across the world. 

The chaos dwarfs (and look no further than Blue in VT's incredible project if you want to learn more about them) are rightly famed. Each was a parody/ode to a previous chaos warrior released by Citadel Miniatures and were filled with a love of sculpting and Warhammer history by the Morrisons. 

The Renaissance Imperial Dwarfs are also worthy of a mention here. They remain a famous selection of models that are still sought after today, even in the years before Oldhammer kicked off. Glorious minis released in 1989. 

9) The Forces of the Imperium

With Rogue Trader becoming an unexpected, runaway success - GW developed the background and miniature line in greater and greater depth as 1989 progressed. The brutal, zany and bizarre sci-fi fantasy world of Warhammer 40,000 developed before the very eyes of the White Dwarf reader. To have been then was an absolute treat as this was the period where everything was expanded and developed for the FIRST TIME. Not recycled or expanded, but original created. It was a magnificent journey into a dark and distant universe, that gave just enough detail to inspire and encourage you, but left enough unknowns for you to develop things any way you wanted. 

This development was supported by some truly exceptional art, produced by heavy weights such as Paul Bonner, Tony Hough and Pete Knifton. Their often black and white images brought the universe to life before our very eyes and many of us became hooked on this fascinatingly brutal world. 

Then came the long line of plastic boxset releases which gave us the opportunity to field larger and larger armies for the first time, with some enthusiasts' collections becoming so large that they put serious strain on the ruleset, which had really been design for skirmish level play. Imperial Guard...

Space Dwarfs.... later, Squats.

And the almost anachronistic Rough Riders, with their dark shades of a European Imperial past. Each set was supported by considerable material published in White Dwarf and the depth and quality of these articles still stands up today, even if the ruleset is seen as a bit of a chugging beast. 

More so, the 40k universe in 1989 was very different than the streamlined and turgid one of today. Abhumans (remember them?) marched alongside a wealth of units and vehicles that would eventual ret-conned out of existence. 

The model lines were also far more subtle in their nods to dystopia, as these fascist looking commissars show. 

While a great deal of the artwork aped historical war photography, as here in one of Phil Knifton's pieces. The Imperial Guard, and their Space Marine allies, would go on to conquer the wargaming world and to this day remains the dominant field of miniature gaming on the planet. 

And most of it was all created, by and large, in 1989. 

8) Death Roller

Back to Blood Bowl, and that gruesome yet comedic style GW had in the 1980s. The Death Roller is perhaps the most iconic of Blood Bowl models. It's concept is a simple one: a steam roller, crewed by a dwarf, used to mowed down unexpected players. Again, Knifton's artwork brings the idea alive in cartoon form and Michael Perry's model remains the most characterful interpretation of the idea. 

I can remember the buzz this model produced when it was first released and I can recall trying to get hold of a model for sometime. Only my classmate, Matthew Pitman was lucky enough get his mits on one, and we were all very envious of him at the time. Again, as we have seen quite a few times now on this blogpost, this now iconic concept owes it's birth to the year 1989. 

7) Space Marine

Space Marine, and Adeptus Titanicus a few months previously, gave us our first true taste of that worldwide phenomenon of the Horus Heresy, only in epic scale. If you were anything like me and read about the game during its development, you probably thought that the box would contain 320 28mm marines, 32 Rhinos and 16 Landraiders - all for £20.00! 

Obviously, the game didn't deliver such an incredible bargain but what it did give us was a sense of scale never before seen in a GW game. The battles we fought across our bedroom floors would extend to the most distant edges of space, the conflicts (especially when four or five of you put your sets together) could involve literally thousands of troops and hundreds of vehicles and the painting, quick and easy. 

Coupled with the Titans, this became the 'must have' game at the end of the year. And linking closely with the background developed for 40k, the Space Marine universe was expanded considerably in White Dwarf. What I enjoyed the most about the first edition was the fact that it was set at a completely different time to Rogue Trader, and we got a sense that we were taking part in something both futurist and ancient at the same time.

A strange feeling really!

A some we have another 'first' for 1989. A proper wargame, set within GW's fictional universe, using epic scale infantry and vehicles. Over the next twenty-five or so years GW would continue to develop the idea but it has it's foundation in our chosen year. 

6) Warhammer Novels

We are getting closer to our goal now and we are almost in the top 5 reasons why 1989 was the pinnacle of GW's development. The previous eleven entries haven't really been in any real order. There is now deeper significance to their position in our countdown but that will soon change. Before we discuss the 5 main reasons why 1989 was such a mighty year we need to look at the first range of GW novels. 

These days the Black Library pumps out a steady stream of tiles and judging by some of the more recent efforts I have glanced over, the quality has been in decline for some years. Of course the modern books do have some real page turning classics, especially titles by Dan Abnett, but by and large the majority of the books have little real depth or characterisation. Which is a real shame, as the original Warhammer Books (released you guessed it, in 1989!) were very different beasts. 

For a start, they were an unusual size, which was fantastic for the reader but not so useful if you were running a bookshop. Apparently, these volumes were difficult to place on the then pretty standard sized shelves in branches of WH Smiths etc. 

The used 'proper' authors as well, with many of the contributors (even if they did hide under pseudonyms) being young gun writers in the fantasy and science fiction scenes.  They were beautifully illustrated too, with colour plates and the black and white pen and ink style familiar from the Fighting Fantasy books. The stories were also far less restricted than Black Library's and in some cases far more adult. In later republications (again by the Black Library) some scenes of a sexual nature were removed or edited (have a look at Zaragoz, for example) and conflicts will modern static background also altered, with characters being totally re-written. 

If you are a fan of fiction and Oldhammer, then these books are a real must. If you are used to the Black Library's version of the worlds of Warhammer and 40k, you may well be in for a shock! 

5) Combat Cards

Okay, we are now into the top 5 reasons and the evidence starts to become serious. Consider the original combat cards and what follows and fairly rough countdown of success. For me in this argument, the next few releases are what make 1989 so significant, especially when you take all the other releases and articles into consideration. With this in mind, why the Combat Cards?

In my view these gaming cards, really GW's version of Top Trumps, took the best elements of the Warhammer HobbyTM out of our bedrooms and into our daily 'outside' lives. You couldn't really carry your Space Marine box to college or school, but these cards could easily slip into a pocket or bag and could be used practically everywhere. I for one can remember long and varied games on the old school bus in my last year at secondary school. These elements were the collecting (you could strive to own all of the different sets, just like a miniature range) but also the admiration (and indeed mesmerisation) of the painted models. many of us spent hours and hours staring forlornly at the superb paint jobs of Mike McVey or Kev Adams. And so significant were these feelings that committed and high creative modern gamers attempt to recreate the look and feel of the models, just look at FimmMcCool's stuff on his blog and you can see what I mean. 

But this being late '80s GW, there was more to these cards than immediately obvious. Remember those strange symbols at the bottom of each card? Crowns, swords and fanged mouths? Though few of us realised it at the time, they were in support of two different 'games' that could be played with the cards if you wanted something deeper than Top Trumps. These games were called 'Attack' and 'Charge' respectively, and clicking on the links will give you further information about them. 

Later on in the very early '90s, GW plc tried to produce a new version of the Combat Cards but they were, quite frankly, awful, probably due to the fact the creative design studio had been sliced to the bone to help pay for the management buy-out and that Bryan Ansell took all the painted miniatures with him. They failed to capture the magic of the original release (a familiar story, sadly) and could be found in bargain bins all over the country for quite some time. 

The cards remain an iconic product from the glory days from the  'classic' Citadel Miniature/Games Workshop company. 

4) Skeleton Army

How could you not love skeleton army? Everyone seemed to own at least one box of these lovely old skeletons and they had a very long shelf life indeed, until they were replaced with some hideous plastic skeletons with enormous hands and spearshafts with a thickness that would have made John Holmes feel inadequate! To this day, many believe them to be the best plastic skeletons ever produced. Of course, sticking them into my argument for 1989 is a bit shaky considering that the base skeletons came from the Skeleton Horde release in 1986! But it was the addition of the cavalry models and the chariot that took this release further, especially when you looked at the price and a great number of undead legions were born thanks to this box set. 

3) Terminator Squad

The all metal Terminator Squad was an incredible release. Many of the GW 'heavyweights' of the era contributed to the project in some way: Wayne England, Mike McVey and John Blanche just a few. For a while, this became a 'must-have' product and launched the Terminator into the stratosphere. 40k would never be the same again. 

The release saw plenty of coverage in White Dwarf and unlike the thinly disguised adverts of later periods of the magazine, there is still much to see nearly 30 years later. What is rather strange about the Terminator box set is that you could watch the concept develop across 1989, as Citadel tried and tried again to work on the concept. Someone somewhere, perhaps Bryan Ansell himself, saw something in the idea and White Dwarf chronicled the development of the Terminator marine almost by accident. 

Enthusiasts will recognise this first model as Jes Goodwin's original sculpt for the terminator armoured marine. This started life earlier on in mid '80s as a one piece sculpt but as the months ticked by it seems that other sculptors all had a go and with each subsequent effort the background was tweaked. 

Take a look. 

If the Space Marines were destined to become the biggest selling wargames miniature of all time, then this Terminator set definitely contributed to that success. The design, advertising and in-house painting all came together and create a long lasting legend. 

2) Heroquest 

If Helen of Troy was the 'face that launched a thousand ships' then Heroquest must be the 'game that made a thousand gamers'! The ultimate gateway drug to both collecting Citadel miniatures and playing games with them. This product was a commercial and critical success shifting over a MILLION copies and remains a fan-favourite to this day. It was so good even my sister played it! 

The irresistible mix of high end GW design and MB's distribution and marketing clout it even fielded an television advert on release, the first and only time I saw a Citadel model on prime time British television, and almost made the uttering the statement 'I'm using my broadsword' in a silly northern accent a national pastime (apart from in the north.) 

Now I could wax lyrical about this game and it's significance but I am not going to for it has already been academically argued by a gentleman known only as 'The Bard'. Watch the video below and see why!

As a side note, let us not forget the 'cousin' of Heroquest, namely Advanced Heroquest was also released in 1989.

1) Space Hulk

Space Hulk remains the greatest GW game ever created and could probably be classified as the greatest miniature board game created by anyone ever! It remains a highly influential game to this day as whizzing through this excellent article by Rob Bradley will show.  It was a game that once played left you with a very strange sensation, especially if you were the marine player. It was tough and tense on the nerves and so easy to face total annihilation once the genestealer closed in. 

In no way shape or form did it hold your hand or dumb down to its audeince. It was also blessed with a large number of high quality supplements and later releases that both developed the game itself, but also added to the background of the 41st millennium. Looking back now at Space Hulk leaves a bittersweet feeling when you think about the fate of it's designer, Richard Halliwell, who I have often described as GW's lost genius. You can read more about his life and contribution of Games Workshop here. 

So hereby ends my argument. Sixteen key releases that should prove to the world that 1989 was the very peak of GW's achievements. The carefully nutured Design Studio with its skilled and imaginative designers, sculptors and artists were producing their finest work and pumping out incredible products day in and day out. Of course, many of the projcts described here would have begun their lifecycles before 1989 but that special year saw them released to the avid gamer and reach public consciousness. Before I depart and you begin the inevitable counter arguments against me, just remember this. The releases described here are just the tip of the iceburg for that year. There were many, many other notable products rushing to the Games Workshop store near you, too! 

I am so so pleased to have riden this particular wave (as surfers are prone to exclaim, or so I have heard) and been highly involved in the GW hobby during this time. I am certain that without the year 1989 and the products GW unleashed on us neither this blog nor Oldhammer would exist at all. 

Thank you and goodnight.

Orlygg