On the 25th of February our beloved Warhammer 40,000 celebrates its 25th birthday, which leaves us thinking, where has the time gone? As we begin our preparations for this momentous occasion, we thought we’d go all the way back to the beginning and see just how far we’ve come.

In 1987, ‘Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader’, contained the first pieces of background about the war torn galaxy of the 41st Millennium and was responsible for introducing the world to Space Marines. Six years later, Ian Watson wrote Space Marine, cementing the reputation of the Adeptus Astartes as the towering, death-dealing, armour clad warriors of the Imperium that we know today. It seems that gene-bred, super-human warriors are everywhere in sci-fi now. Space Marine is an old novel and not exactly up to date with the current view on the Warhammer 40,000 universe, but if you want an insight into what got the ball rolling, check it out here.

The first ever Black Library novel released was Dan Abnett’s First and Only, way back in 1999. In fact, the name of the book was a bit of a joke, as we weren’t sure that it would be popular enough to warrant a second one! Thankfully that wasn’t the case and since then, we’ve released two hundred and seventeen Warhammer 40,000 titles, featuring every race in the game (and more besides) and spanning ten thousand years of war. We thought it would be cool to find out how many words that would be, so we set to work, and after scouring every book, we can confidently say that this makes up a total of seventeen billion, three hundred and sixty thousand, one hundred and three words (give or take a fairly huge amount)!

We mentioned earlier that we were planning something special to mark the birthday. By order of the Inquisition, we can’t tell you much about it at the moment, but we have managed to sneak this preview past the guards. Let us know what you think it might be on our Facebook page.

We mentioned earlier that we were planning something special to mark the birthday. By order of the Inquisition, we can’t tell you much about it at the moment, but we have managed to sneak this preview past the guards. Let us know what you think it might be on our Facebook page.

Join us here on the 25th when we will announce what’s coming out and make sure you bring cake!