Where Warhammer came from

I assumed Games Workshop had always made Warhammer. It seemed obvious. The company is named after the workshop, the workshop makes the models, the models are Warhammer.

Games Workshop’s own timeline says otherwise, and the gap is bigger than I expected.

The dates, from the company itself

Founded in 1975, as a UK mail-order business, by three friends who wanted to share their hobby. White Dwarf in 1977. The first shop in 1978, at 1 Dalling Road in Hammersmith. The original Citadel Miniatures in 1979, described as being for use in roleplaying systems or simply for collecting. Warhammer’s first edition in 1983. Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader in 1987. The head office moves to the middle of England in 1997, taking the Warhammer World visitor centre with it.^*

What that shape means

Eight years passed between the company existing and Warhammer existing. Twelve before 40,000. In that time Games Workshop ran a mail-order business, launched a magazine, opened a shop and started a miniatures line, all of it around games mostly made by other people.

The 1979 Citadel entry is the one that rearranged my head. Those miniatures were sold for roleplaying systems, or to collect, four years before there was a Warhammer to put them in. The models did not come along to serve the game. The game arrived into a company that already knew how to make models.

They started by making wooden boards

Games Workshop’s investor-facing history says the three founders “began selling handmade, classic wooden games from their homes in London”.^† Not importing. Making.

Wikipedia is more specific, and this is where I have to flag the tier: it is an encyclopedia rather than the company, and it is the only source here that names anybody. It says the founders were John Peake, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, and that they made wooden boards for backgammon, mancala, nine men’s morris and Go before they became a Dungeons & Dragons importer.^‡

Backgammon boards. Whatever I expected the origin of Warhammer to be, it was not a mancala board made in someone’s flat.

Wikipedia also dates White Dwarf to June 1977, replacing a newsletter called Owl and Weasel, and the first shop to April 1978.^‡

Nobody can agree when Citadel started

Here is my favourite thing I found, and it is a small piece of bookkeeping.

Games Workshop’s careers timeline dates the original Citadel Miniatures to 1979.^* Games Workshop’s investor history says “in 1981 Games Workshop helped to found Citadel Miniatures Limited”, at Newark-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire.^† Wikipedia puts the co-founding in late 1978.^‡

Three sources, three years, and two of the three are the same company talking about itself. I am not going to pick one. If the firm’s own investor relations and its own careers page differ by two years on when its miniatures arm began, the honest answer is that the date is somewhere in there and the tidy version you read elsewhere is tidier than the record.

What happened after the games

The investor history carries the part the hobby rarely talks about. In December 1991 Tom Kirby led a management buy-out. In September 1994 the company floated on the London Stock Exchange. In October 1997 all UK operations moved to the current headquarters in Lenton, Nottingham.^†

Tom Kirby is the only individual either Games Workshop page names anywhere in its own history, which tells you something about how this company narrates itself: the buy-out gets a name, the founders do not.

What the timelines will not tell you

Neither Games Workshop page names a founder. Both say “three friends” or “three game fanatics” and stop there, which is why the names above come with a tier warning attached rather than from the company.

Neither says anything about the launch of Rogue Trader beyond the year, so whether the first edition of 40,000 was as knowingly funny as its reputation suggests stays unanswered. That one needs the book itself, and I do not have a copy.

Neither explains the relationship between Games Workshop and Citadel in those early years, beyond the investor page’s “helped to found”.

Bryan Ansell appears in the Wikipedia account as the managing director and majority owner whose arrival preceded the turn towards miniature wargames.^‡ No Games Workshop page I read mentions him, which is a strange gap in a company history and not one I can fill.

The dates are mostly solid. The story around them is somebody else’s, and the company’s own account of itself has a two-year hole in the middle of it.