The digital and quite interactive Old World

The fact that thousands of grown men still play with toy soldiers, despite being a sad sociological truth, is also a great opportunity for greedy profit. Games Workshop, a company that started out by creating simple wooden toys, is the company that has so far exploited this manly need (in its fantasy version at least) and has created the all-powerful, all singing and all dancing Warhammer franchise. But selling toy soldiers can never be enough. Warhammer, originally and at heart a tabletop miniature paint’em up strategic game, was soon (if 15 years are considered a small time frame) transported to the digital media.

For example: You, me and everybody who will be willing to pay around 50 euros (~55$), will soon be able to enjoy the forthcoming (obviously) and much hyped RTS (Real Time Strategy for the uninitiated) Warhammer: Mark of Chaos. It will definitely be a looker, a hypothetically faithful adaptation of the Warhammer 6th edition rules and the Old World background, and should be out by the end of 2006. In case you would like to read a fine preview, take a look at what either IGN or Namco have to tell you. What I’m going to talk about here instead, are the Warhammer video games of yore, which surprisingly haven’t been numerous. The futuristic Warhammer 40,000 has until now proven a more lucrative franchise, as many more pc and console outings prove. Allow me to remind you of the recent and rather successful Dawn of War, the first Games Workshop video game to actually hit the charts.

On with Warhammer then… Let’s start from a game that was published by Micro League back in 1995, was set in the Warhammer world, but wasn’t a Warhammer game per se. It was Blood Bowl, or to be more precise, an extremely faithful adaptation of the “Specialist” Games Workshop hybrid of board-miniature-sports game Blood Bowl, that was quite cleverly named Blood Bowl too. And as you should have imagined, Blood Bowl was something like rugby or American Football, only more brutal, almost funny and 100% turn based. Its stars were Orcs, Trolls, Elves (Dark or vanilla flavoured), even Halfings or Zombies. The rules for both the board and the pc game, were simple, allowed for a huge variety of tactics and made an excellent game.

Then, Mindscape published Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat in 1995, making that video gaming year the most Warhammer crowded one ever. The game was a very interesting RTS game without any resource-gathering mechanic whatsoever, that was based on the 5th edition of the Warhammer rules and was the first RTS sporting a full-blown 3d graphics engine (and beautiful 2d cut-scenes too). Shadow of the Horned Rat had an engrossing story line, was a real tactical challenge, but also one of the most cruelly difficult games ever. Of the few people who actually played it, nobody (to my knowledge) finished the damn thing. The controls of the pc version didn’t help very much either, even though I do believe that executing an elegant flank charge with a cavalry regiment in real life has to be much harder. The PlayStation version though, did get the controls almost right.

So did the game’s 1998 sequel Warhammer: Dark Omen. It was still painfully unfair to the player mind you, but at least one felt one stood a chance. The graphics were, and even by today’s standards still are, brilliant and the story included Undead sorcerers and nasty necromantic magic. Joy. You can still find a review of the game at the Home of the Underdogs.

And… that’s all. Believe it or not, these three games are all the Warhammer based video games ever released. This consequently leads to a rather short article (post), that I could extend by referring to the story of the ill-fated Warhammer Online MMORPG. But I wont. I will instead point you the direction of our dear Wikipedia.
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Interested in more Warhammer related material? Take a look at my tactics article, or perhaps at a review of the Monsters and Mercenaries Collectors Guide. If, on the other hand, you prefer reading about PC Games, browse through reviews of Namco Museum, Apprentice Deluxe, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Civilization 4 or And Then There Were None.

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