History of Games Workshop and Blizzard

I feel like it's a pretty accepted anecdote at this point with wargamers, especially those that play Warhammer(s) or any of Blizzard's video games, that the two feel like they should be interlinked in some way. I've heard all sorts of things; WarCraft 1 was a warhammer game, Starcraft started as a 40k game, Games workshop sued Blizzard for their use of "Space Marine" and lost, thus having to change the name to "Adeptus Astartes". What I've never seen is really any collected proof of these claims, and I'm pretty nosy. Let's try and get to the bottom of it!

Bunch of Blueberries, just standing around

 

So, as I've talked about before on this blog, I grew up a big fan of Starcraft, both 1 and 2. I had a hand-me-down windows 98 PC, and a copy of SC1+BW from a friend who didn't care about it anymore in the year of our lord 2015. Wonder why. Anyway, I'd play it back to back to back. Despite this, I still can't beat that damn second to last BW zerg level. There's just so many nukes!

A disclaimer too - I'm not here to point fingers about "who stole from who", since in my lived experience, that's not really how art works. We're all constantly stealing from each other and combining ideas, and we call it inspiration. And I'm sure as hell not going to bat for either Games Workshop or Blizzard, as both companies are exactly that: giant mega-companies. They can fight their own legal battles. What I'm interested in here is the charting flow of ideas, and if the anecdotes I've heard are actually true.

Now with Monster Types!

So, to start out with, let's look at timelines. The first edition of the properly titled warhammer game, unfortunately titled "Warhammer The Mass Combat Fantasy Role-Playing Game", was released in 1983 [1] (Yes, I'm going to cite wikipedia, at least for the dates. Take that high school teachers). In short, it was an evolution of other rulesets for skirmish battles around at the time, and was very context-less but inspired heavily by the generally tolkien-ish fantasy.

I ironically love the cardboard cutouts for the Ork Dreadnought in the 2nd edition box

Next, in 1987 [2], the game "Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader" was released. It was originally envisioned as a role-playing game, a futuristic offshoot of the warhammer fantasy battles that had won the company acclaim. This development continued to 1993 [3], when the second edition was released in the more recognizable wargame form the game takes today. These books laid out the rules for constructing and army, and introduced the lore most recognizable today, pulling from many sources of sci-fi (but especially Frank Herbert's Dune. That one doesn't need a citation... like, duh. Butlerian Jihad, much?).

Briefing cinematic for Warcraft

Similarly, in 1994 [4] the nascent Blizzard entertainment released the game "Warcraft: Orcs & Humans", following that up with a sequel in 1995, and then in 1998 [5] Starcraft. 

I think at this point it has to be said: There is a lot of incidental evidence - both companies began with a colorful stylized fantasy war game, featuring orks and humans, and then went on to follow it up with a space game featuring warriors in power armor. It's really interesting, but I think more than anything it speaks to the pool of media in the nerdy sphere of the 80's and 90's. Obviously, Dune had a direct influence on both of these properties, lore for Warhammer 40k, and even more directly for blizzard, in the form of the Dune 2 being the progenitor of the RTS genre coming out in 1992 [6]. 

Believe it or not, Dune 2 is still quite playable. Dare I even say, fun!

The popularity of fantasy role-playing games, especially Dungeons & Dragons being present in the late 1970's [7] during the childhoods of people who worked on the products we're talking about. It was absolutely an influence at blizzard, with Bill Roper (Warcraft writer/voice actor and also later VP of Blizzard North) saying [8], 

 "I was told there were no scripts – nothing at all. So we sat there and I just wrote some stuff down, and I guess all those years of being a Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons paid off because I just wrote out a script and we recorded it." 

Similarly, Games Workshop had deep ties with Dungeons & Dragons, starting as the UK importer for the game books [9], and with their sister company Citadel Miniatures (née Conquest Miniatures, which makes it damn hard to search nowadays) being the official manafacturer of AD&D gaming miniatures in the 1980s [10].

Official AD&D miniatures from Citadel

It also should be said, the 80's contained a panoply of mainstream fantasy and sci-fi movies - Aliens (1986) and Conan the Barbarian (1982) as prime examples. Fantasy and sci-fi were in the air, especially in nerd spaces. 

 (As an aside, I feel like I should also shout out Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers introducing power armor to the scene in 1959 [11]. It didn't have a movie made about it until 1997, and that movie didn't focus on the armor that much. Still - I'm aware it exists, and likely influenced things!)

Frank Frazetta's Death Dealer, 1973 [12]

All to say it's not unreasonable to assume that creative folks at this time were iterating on the things they'd seen before, and they had probably seen very similar things to each other, and thus, it's possible they reached the same creative conclusions.

Still, let's get some concrete things going. In a 2019 interview, Patrick Wyatt (programmer on Warcraft) said, "We all loved fantasy and Tolkien was a major inspiration". As for the licensing the Warhammer brand: "It was certainly discussed. Allen was keen on it to try and increase sales and gain brand recognition but as far as I was concerned, I was pleased when nothing came of it. We wanted to create and control our own universe, although Warhammer became a big influence in the art style of Warcraft." as reported by GamesRadar [13]. This interview was also covered by Kotaku, who seems to have edited the conversation differently [14].

"[Blizzard co-founder] Allen Adham hoped to obtain a license to the Warhammer universe to try to increase sales by brand recognition", Wyatt says. "Warhammer was a huge inspiration for the art-style of Warcraft, but a combination of factors, including a lack of traction on business terms and a fervent desire on the part of virtually everyone else on the development team (myself included) to control our own universe nixed any potential for a deal. We had already had terrible experiences working with DC Comics on "Death and Return of Superman" and "Justice League Task Force", and wanted no similar issues for our new game."

So, one of the rumors I've heard repeated has been sort of confirmed: Yes, Warcraft 1 was possibly to be a licensed Warhammer game, but it didn't sound like it progressed any further than a maybe, and wasn't pushed hard, both because (it sounds like) Games Workshop wasn't interested, and the dev team wasn't interested in using someone else's IP.

Note: I can't find any public information about Games Workshop either confirming or denying that Blizzard did reach out, or that they weren't interested, but also that's the kind of internal thing that wouldn't be announced in say White Dwarf. "Hey we're not making a game!", y'know. We don't know exactly how far that pitch went, whether it was simply a conversation at Blizzard that ended in a meeting room, or if they reached out and tried to negotiate a deal.

This game looks so cool, but the interface was really clunky, even for the time. But I would play the crap out of a modern re-imagining with this art style. It's so crunchy!

That being said, I suspect that GW regretted that decision, licensing their property out to a developer called Mindscape for the 1995 game "Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat" [15], after seeing the success of RTS games in the PC space. This game was first covered in White Dwarf issue 192 [16]. I'm going to pull several quotes from this, but for the full context, check out the citation.

"The idea of someone, somewhere, producing a computer version of the Warhammer game has filled us with excitement and terror in fairly equal measure for some time now. The dilemma has always been that it would be all too easy to make a complete mess of things and end up doing more harm than good."

"In the computer world, there seems. to be an unfortunate habit of taking an existing board game or tabletop game, and just slapping it straight onto the computer."

It should be said at this point that Blizzard would not have been considered a powerhouse in the gaming world at the time they might have reached out to Games Workshop, if they did at all. To date, they'd released the well received but not-as-enduring Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. They'd also recently been acquired by (of all people) the distributors responsible for the game Math Blaster [17][18]. Again, in the realm of possibility: If GW was already nervous (which the above interview leads me to believe they were. It's a wild thing to start an article about your cool new game with!) about loaning their IP out to other companies, and a company with a resume like that approached them for a Warhammer license, I feel it's understandable that they'd be unenthusiastic at best. 

It was only after Warcraft did Blizzard become a major name in the games sphere, selling over a hundred thousand units in it's first year [19][20]. 

All right, I feel like I wrote a lot. Let's break the discussion of Starcraft and the legal ownership of "Space Marine" into another post for next time. Until then, thanks for reading!

- Miss Captain Bear