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Games Workshop At 40: How They Brought D&D To Britain
An anonymous reader writes: Following on the fortieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons last year, another formative influence on modern gaming is celebrating its fortieth birthday: Games Workshop. Playing at the World covers the story of how the founders, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (not the other Steve Jackson), started out as subscribers to the 1960s British gaming zine Albion playing Diplomacy by mail and (in Ian's case) publishing silly cartoons. When Albion folded at the beginning of 1975, Livingstone and Jackson formed Games Workshop with its own zine Owl & Weasel as a way to bring "progressive games" (as in "progressive rock") to the UK. Shortly thereafter, when they discovered Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy and role-playing games became their focus. After Owl & Weasel grew up into White Dwarf in 1977, its famous "Fiend Factory" column ended up populating the D&D Fiend Folio. And in the 1980s, of course, they brought us Warhammer and their retail stories brought stylish miniatures to many a needful gamer. Happy birthday to Games Workshop!
At $750 if you want any type of starting army, then two bucks a point if you are not a very fine painter (which means $4000 if you are going for a 2000 point army), as well as the rulebooks, spell cards, army builders, printouts to give to the opponent explaining what you have, Warhammer is pretty pricy.
To boot, if you want to do any tournaments, your painting style and color matching of units can cost you a win, since it is factored in.
Then there are the scenery, and tables... again, not cheap.
Nothing wrong with it, but Games Workshop stuff definitely isn't exactly cheap entertainment. IMHO, they are the Apple of the gaming ecosystem -- they can charge whatever they want, and people will still beat down their doors for new and updated rules (such as the new wood/dark/high elf redo for example.)
It's also been hilarious to watch their long-term relationship with the video games industry. They worked out ages ago that there's money to be made from video games and that they'd like some of it. But how they've gone about it defies belief.
Because the problem is that if the video games are too good, they might make people feel that they don't need the miniatures. So their history with the video-gaming industry is mostly one of third-party titles that were deliberately specced to be mediocre, a horribly misguided cockteasing of Blizzard (whose long term commercial consequences for Games Workshop almost stand up there with those for Nintendo after they played too hard with Sony over the SNES-CD) and... the Relic games (the Dawn of War series, plus Space Marine), which were actually dangerously good.
Since Relic folded, it's clear that GW aren't going to let anybody else that talented near the cash-cow WH40k franchise - all that's produced these days are mobile-style deliberately-inferior ports of GW's oldest board-games.
I remember when you could go into Games Workshop and buy D&D (or RuneQuest, or Traveller) and I even subscribed to White Dwarf at one time. Then Warhammer took over their shops and White Dwarf. Unsurprisingly, this was about the same time I stopped getting White Dwarf and visiting Games Workshops. They must have been making a lot more money from Warhammer. They now appear to just do Warhammer and Lord of the Rings figures from what I've seen in the window of their local shop. Their business plans seems to rely on a few, very lucrative, customers.
When I used to play D&D I only bought the rule books and monster manuals.
Scenery and dungeons were created with things from the garden & plaster of paris / plasticine for the important quest stuff (like monuments / statues)
Almost all my vehicles, boats / wagons etc were made out of wood
The most fun, however, was creating the characters and monsters with cheap plastic army / farm figures and a soldering iron. It was painstaking, but meant each was subtly different physically and I could even tack-on extra items, such as weapons, backpacks, shields and such.
For me at aged 8 to 13, it was about bringing the world to life and becoming fully immersed in a beautifully rendered environment and a painstakingly planned quest / story - whilst following the rules laid out.
Although this wouldn't work for massive combat like 40k - I never did understand why people would buy rows and rows of overpriced, cheap (And they got cheaper and cheaper quality) 'models' and line them up in crappy sub-hornby-style environments.
For me, they brought only a loose world for my imagination to sculpt and I loved it. I was hooked on their writing from Deathtrap Dungeon FF days - but even as a young child never subscribed, nor could afford, the model side of their business.