Few companies in tabletop gaming can boast so rich and enduring a heritage as Games Workshop.
In the nearly 40 years since it was founded as a back-room mail order business selling niche roleplaying games, the
UK-based firm has grown into a global brand with hundreds of retail stores around the world.
Its growth rests largely on the back of its iconic fantasy and science fiction battle games Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, whose players often resemble fans more than customers. They spend considerable sums of money and much of their time building, painting and fighting battles with armies of miniature plastic heroes, villains, monsters and mechanoids. In the process they’ve generated annual profits for the company running to tens of millions of pounds.
But while the dedication of these devotees to what Games Workshop calls the hobby has been incredibly lucrative, success hasn’t always come easily. The company has faced competitors and market slumps. It’s suffered as a result of management decisions and been battered at times by backlashes from its own customers. Recent years have seen sales, profits and share prices slide, leading some onlookers to question whether its empire of paint and plastic – one of the most influential forces in all of gaming – can endure.
With the company preparing to mark four decades in the games business, Unplugged Games spoke to key figures from its past to discover the truth about its origins, its expansion and the creation of its hugely popular gaming universe.
The early years
When I spoke to Games Workshop’s co-founder Ian Livingstone, he was in the midst of an attempt to open a public secondary school in London.
On first inspection, he seems an unlikely schoolmaster. Like a surprising number of entrepreneurs, his own academic career was inauspicious. He scraped through one A-level exam, getting an E grade in geography, and didn’t attend university.
But he said his proposed school, with a curriculum emphasising science, technology, engineering, arts and maths, would address some fundamental failings of conventional schooling.
“Traditional education punishes you for making mistakes,” he said, “and it just drives the risk-taking, entrepreneurial spirit out of you.
“But we’ll be using the principles of game-based learning. Games give you the opportunity to make mistakes and to fail in a safe environment. And if you look at what you’re doing when you play a game, you’re problem-solving, you’re being creative, you’re learning intuitively.”
Games have been good to Livingstone. Since founding Games Workshop he’s gone on to head video game publisher Eidos, responsible for the Tomb Raider, Hitman and Deus Ex franchises among others. These days he’s recognised as one of the leading luminaries of British gaming – both analogue and digital.
But in the early 1970s he was just one of three friends who shared a love of traditional games.
“I had always played games,” he said. “I was captain of my school chess club and I played Monopoly almost incessantly. I was always trying to persuade people to play it with me.
“But I was never really satisfied with the commercial games that were available, and I always wanted to turn my hobby of playing games into the business of making them.”
That opportunity came when Livingstone moved into a flat in London’s Shepherds Bush with old school friends Steve Jackson (not to be confused with the US games publisher of the same name) and John Peake.
“John was a pretty handy craftsperson, he really enjoyed woodcrafting,” Livingstone recalled.
“So he would make Go boards and backgammon sets and we would sell them to local shops, and that was how Workshop really came about.”
The fledgling business initially focused on these traditional products, but it took a sudden turn when its founders discovered an entirely new type of game from across the Atlantic.
“We used to publish a very amateurish gaming fanzine called Owl and Weasel,” said Livingstone.
“Somehow one of the people who got hold of it was Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and he sent us a copy of the game.”
Dungeons & Dragons was unlike anything that had previously been published. Rooted in the tradition of historical miniature wargaming, it cast players not as generals in charge of armies but as individual characters in a shared fantasy adventure. Players would speak their characters’ words and describe their actions. Half way between board game and live improvisational theatre, it was creative, engaging and immersive in a way that no game before had ever been.
Livingstone and Jackson were instantly hooked.
“Steve and I became obsessed with D&D,” Livingstone said. “Creating this fantastic world of roleplaying, exploring dungeons, killing monsters, finding treasure.
“When we got the game it didn’t look like much; it was a plain white box with a pretty basic illustration on the front. But when you opened that box you opened up your own imagination.
“I enjoyed the creative part of it, orchestrating the adventure, luring people to their doom and just the instant theatre that was made by people roleplaying: the conversation, the character types, trying to overcome problems that were put before them. The rules only ever came into play to determine success or failure.”
Livingstone and Jackson didn’t just enjoy D&D, they saw it as an opportunity. The game’s popularity had grown steadily in the United States, and the pair recognised its potential to spread to the
UK. They wrote to Gygax ordering another six copies. He responded by offering them exclusive rights to distribute the game in Europe.
At this point John Peake, who didn’t share his friends’ enthusiasm for dungeon delving, left the company. Jackson and Livingstone began selling D&D from their home, gradually building demand for the game by word-of-mouth and through their Owl and Weasel newsletter.
“We were desperate not to let Gygax know that we were running the company from our flat,” Livingstone said.
“But what we didn’t know at the time was that he was publishing Dungeons & Dragons from his flat as well. Both parties were assuming that the other was some big-time operation, but it was very much a fledgling industry at the time.”
Gygax wasn’t the only person to make that assumption.
“Because we’d called the business Games Workshop, people assumed there must actually be a shop,” Livingstone said.
“We were in this top-floor flat, and we’d get people walking up the street confusedly looking for a shop that wasn’t there. We used to lean out the window and shout: ‘We’re up here, mate!’ and they’d come up the stairs.”
Eventually their landlord tired of the stream of customers and product deliveries. Livingstone and Jackson faced a stark ultimatum: either cease trading or find themselves homeless.
“Steve and I ended up living in a van for three months,” Livingstone said.
“We rented an office for the company behind an estate agent, and we’d get out of the van at eight in the morning, work on mail order until midnight then get back in this smelly old van to sleep. We were parked next to a squash club, so we joined that just so that we’d have somewhere to wash and shave, and we both got very good at squash as a result, sort of by default.”
The mail order business was performing well, but the company found it difficult to get D&D into established toy and model shops. This limited sales prospects to people who’d heard about the game from friends or read about it in one of several fanzines published by games enthusiasts. If Games Workshop was to grow, it would need premises of its own.
In April of 1978 the company opened its first retail shop on Dalling Road in Hammersmith, west London. The outlet stocked D&D books and accessories as well as products for a number of other imported American roleplaying games. At around the same time, Livingstone and Jackson rejected a proposed merger with TSR – the US-based publisher of Dungeons & Dragons – a move which led to Games Workshop losing its exclusive right to distribute the game in the
UK.
White Dwarf
The company had also recently revamped its newsletter, retiring the amateur Owl and Weasel and replacing it with the slicker, more professional White Dwarf.
The new magazine’s name was designed to appeal equally to fans of science fiction and fantasy. It could be interpreted as referring to the remnants of a dying star or to an actual dwarf character from Tolkienesque fiction.
The title carried game reviews, supplementary material for roleplaying games and complete plots and settings for players to build their adventures around. But it also featured wider examples of what we might think of today as geek culture: reviews of science fiction and fantasy novels, recurring comic strips, short stories and even source code for the ZX Spectrum – a popular early home computer system released in the
UK.
The magazine also featured a monthly readers’ letters page which, in the days before the internet, became one of the most prominent forums in the
UK for players to discuss games and the culture surrounding them. Readers would quibble over the minutiae of rules and argue the merits of various roleplaying systems. At times they would also directly criticise the magazine and Games Workshop itself.
In an early instance of a refrain that still echoes around
SF and fantasy fandom today, one disgruntled reader complained:
“I really must protest, in the strongest possible terms, about the appalling cover of issue 44. When are we going to see the end of these chainmail bikinis, for heaven’s sake? Not only are they sexist, they are dumb. No female adventurer with an ounce of brains would go monster-chasing in that kind of outfit.”
The title’s readership increased steadily. In one editorial, Livingstone, who edited White Dwarf at the time, wrote:
“I am pleased to announce that the monthly circulation of White Dwarf now exceeds 20,000 copies … Roleplaying games have been growing in popularity since 1975. They are not a fad like skateboards or Rubik’s Cube.”
Nowadays White Dwarf is published in a smaller, weekly format. It’s more attractively designed, far more colourful and makes much more effective use of photography and illustration. But it’s little more than a marketing device for Games Workshop products, and much of its charm and sense of community is gone.
Building a Citadel
White Dwarf had helped to establish Games Workshop as the biggest player in
UK gaming, but by the early 1980s the company faced new difficulties. Its time as the exclusive distributor of its best-selling product, Dungeons & Dragons, was coming to an end.
The company had released a line of board games including the two-player wargame Valley of the Four Winds, Mad Max-inspired Battlecars and a licensed tabletop adaptation of the Doctor Who television series, which found some success. But none of them established themselves as firmly on the gaming consciousness as D&D, and the directors desperately wanted a genuine best-selling game owned and controlled entirely by the company.
“We worked hard to build up Dungeons & Dragons, but ultimately it wasn’t ours,” said Livingstone, “so in the end we were working for someone else.
“We started asking ourselves what the point was of promoting other peoples’ products when we didn’t own them. We began to feel that we’d be better off developing our own intellectual property, creating value for ourselves rather than somebody else and having control over our own future.”
The eventual solution to the problem came not from within the company itself, but from an offshoot established in 1978.
Citadel Miniatures was a design and production studio set up to manufacture metal figures for use in roleplaying games. Headed by designer Bryan Ansell, the new sister-company was intended as Games Workshop’s doorway into the miniatures market, which came with the potential for much higher profits than rulebook publishing.
But Citadel wasn’t just supposed to sell miniatures; it was supposed to sell a lot of miniatures, and achieving that with a customer base made up largely of D&D players presented a problem.
For the most part, roleplay gamers bought one model at a time. They played single characters in long-running campaigns, and that meant they could go for years without needing to buy more miniatures.
Ansell decided that a more lucrative approach would be to emulate the historical wargaming business, where customers bought entire armies at a time, ordering tens or even hundreds of figures and generating far greater profits.
To make that happen, Games Workshop would need to publish a new game – a radical departure from its previous offerings. Ansell turned to designers Richard Halliwell and Rick Priestly to produce a set of rules for full-scale battles that would appeal to die-hard fantasy roleplayers.
It was to be called Warhammer.
This post originally stated that Richard Halliwell was a member of staff at Citadel Miniatures when he was asked to produce a fantasy wargame for the company. The text was amended on 14 February 2015 when a former colleague clarified that Halliwell was working as a freelancer at the time.
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Coming next week in our in-depth series on Games Workshop: The success of Citadel Miniatures along with the rise of Warhammer led to massive growth, but also to a bitter dispute within the company. We speak to some of the most important figures from the creative and commercial sides of the firm about the tumultuous development of a phenomenally popular gaming universe.
