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Hey Dakka, I was wondering if there was any books, PDFs, blog posts and such on the web that is mostly a well documented history of Games Workshop and by extension the miniature wargaming hobby? As well somewhat unbiased. I ask because I was looking to start my own research project on the issue in my own free time.

Also, I figured the financials and trends might be a good look at as well.


Thanks!

IDK about Games Workshop in particular.

Achtung Schweinehund! by Harry Pearson is a good light history of wargaming in general.

Well HG Wells is pretty much cited as the inventor of table top Wargaming as we know it:

http://kotaku.com/5944058/hg-wells-practically-invented-modern-tabletop-wargaming

And Peter Cushing was an avid war gamer who probably influenced a lot of gamers certainly in the UK:

http://wargamingmiscellany.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/wargames-on-film-and-tv-peter-cushing.html

There are probably a lot of websites about the history of GW but not sure about published literature though.

You will probably find more info on Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone as obviously they became more famous after they left (Tomb Raider being a good example).

And there's probably more info about Bryan Ansell but again don't think anything published.

I personally would like to know more about the "5th Beatle" of GW.

The guy who left as he didn't like the direction the company was going in and stayed making wooden chess sets in his garage... then years later the rest of the founders are all millionaires....

The best you can do on the history of GW is by spending some time in all the blogs dedicated to retro GW stuff.

http://realmofchaos80s.blogspot.com/ is a really great one, and has a lot of interviews with former GW folks.

 Brother SRM wrote:
The best you can do on the history of GW is by spending some time in all the blogs dedicated to retro GW stuff.

http://realmofchaos80s.blogspot.com/ is a really great one, and has a lot of interviews with former GW folks.

That has several interviews making it the best place to go.

There's also this,
http://www.vectormagazine.co.uk/article.asp?articleID=42

I'm pretty sure I read someone's Master's thesis on GW not too long ago, but I can't find it.

Here are two other articles I came across on Google Scholar, that are not directly relevant to OP's question, but some of you might find interesting anyway:


http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1610889&show=abstract

http://people.uleth.ca/~sameer.deshpande/documents/Abstracts/2004_ACR_Gender_Warhammer.pdf

Alright, thanks everyone! I will check those out soon. It seems hard to find legitimate first-hand sources on the history of GW since they seem to be tight-lipped from the get-go for the most part.

Here's another one to browse through

http://life-in-miniature.blogspot.co.uk/

 Kilkrazy wrote:
IDK about Games Workshop in particular.

Achtung Schweinehund! by Harry Pearson is a good light history of wargaming in general.

Came into this thread, clicked this link and the book looks so entertaining I went ahead and ordered it. Thanks!

I think my previous link is broken, try here instead. It's a good history of the early days with some anecdotes.

http://www.bsfa.co.uk/www.vectormagazine.co.uk/article.asp%3FarticleID=42.html