Space Marines are the last hope of game designers looking for a protagonist that’s justifiably fearless and heroic. Orks are an ideal antagonist because they’re justifiably stupid and able to die in huge swathes at once. So why has it taken this long for them to emerge into videogames?

I remember when I first laid my eyes on screenshots of Fire Warrior, the Warhammer 40000-based FPS title that put you in the shoes of a valiant Tau (blue, arrogant, and alien) soldier taking on the forces of the Imperium (galaxy-spanning human empire). I leaped around the room, I punched the air, and I celebrated. Most people simply stared at the odd character design, the horrendous amounts of lore, and the disappointment of not being a space marine, and walked off.

The barrier to the the world of Games Workshop creations is the amount of fiction you’d need to immerse yourself in, but the brave men and women in Nottingham who strive to bring you this fiction make it as easy as possible to do so. If sci-fi is your choice for immersive game worlds, then the 40000 universe is a viable choice. If it’s fantasy, then Warhammer Fantasy is probably the logical path to take towards enjoying the fiction to the best possible degree. Big battles, small battles, spaceship battles… even a parodied American football variation on Games Workshop’s variety of tabletop games is available.

//For the Emperor
So when we transport it over to videogames, a variety of genres and characters are born, from the MMO Warhammer Online to the upcoming Blood Bowl sports title. But how will game designers make us feel like we’re still fourteen and playing with the plastic miniatures we were still learning how to paint and glue together?

Your answer lies in Dawn of War II. You have a fixed amount of units, and you can customise their paint scheme and wargear, already affording the player a degree of personalisation that has become the cornerstone of what Games Workshop miniatures are all about. There are no bases, no ludicrous amounts of resource-harvesting units flitting back and forth; just you and your little space marines versus the world.

Not every strategy title comes with a storyline, and very few Warhammer 40000 titles provided anything beyond background information for special units. But Dawn of War II attempted to take you into the realm of tabletop gaming as much as was possible without actually forcing you to spend a lot of money on glue and paint. In the day and age of a Playstation 3 peripheral that will allow you to play virtual tabletop strategy titles simply by waving a wand, are we still in need of Relic’s RTS format? Has the mouse become obsolete?

I’d wager the answer is no. As great as virtual miniatures would be, and as much money as we would save from not trekking to the nearest hobby store to blow our wages on Chaos Black spray and bits of fake grass, the concept of seeing your miniatures run and shoot by themselves is fascinating.

//Kill the alien, burn the heretic
I remember standing in Games Workshop as a teenager, watching people play. I never played too much myself, but I was a sucker for painting and reading the brilliant literature that formed the basis for all the little daemons and heroic characters battling each other on the polystyrene plateau below me. I stood there, and I thought to myself: “wouldn’t it be cool if that space marine could actually run?”

When Dawn of War appeared, I was astounded at the level of verisimilitude the game possessed in reference to the source text. Sure, it was an RTS with bases, resources, and that god awful bank of sound-bites that played every time you selected a particular unit on the battlefield, but I was still looking at a fully animated army of Space Marines, running and gunning their way through a campaign. Not just them, but Eldar, Chaos, and eventually every army bar the Tyranids – a race who, if you use Google Image Search, will throw up some rather suspicious correlations with the design of the Zerg in StarCraft.

Whether you’re a fan of the miniatures or simply unaware, it’s been hard to ignore the great reviews and positive press that Games Workshop’s forays into videogames have largely enjoyed. It could be easily suggested the only real way to ever counteract the huge franchises like Warcraft and StarCraft would be to essentially bring in the franchise that ultimately served as the biggest inspiration for them.

//Truth is beauty
If you take a look at a lot of science fiction and fantasy settings in contemporary videogames, and compare them to the stage Games Workshop were at in the eighties, you’ll notice a lot of similarities between the two. The Zerg of StarCraft fame are Tyranids, Thrall and his Orcs in Orgrimmar are simply World of Warcraft’s version of the Ork mobs introduced in Warhammer Fantasy. Even the olden-days-styling of Fable II’s city hub leans heavily on the visual style brought into the minds of game designers by Mordenheim. It’s difficult to escape the comparisons, and even easier to claim that all of these designs, Games Workshop included, are simply subtle nods to J.R. Tolkien himself.

I remember a night on the World of Warcraft forums for Europe. Reading through threads about lore, I stumbled across a thread full of snickering, due to the original poster stating that the Lord of the Rings films stole heavily from BIizzard’s design content, and that Tolkien should be sued. If I look back now, admittedly with far less derisive laughter, I can see his point. It’s all roughly the same material, coming at us from all angles, and the vast majority of developers are getting it wrong. Orcs are not intelligent; it is this that separates us from them, not their green skin. Insect overminds are simply harking back to old documentaries on the Discovery Channel discussing ant mentality and the concept of a dominant consciousness in conjunction with a photographic memory.

So where to start with Games Workshop’s endless supply of design material? Have they indeed arrived too late to the party? It would seem so, due to Blizzard’s monopoly over videogame Orcs and goblins. However, Games Workshop bring something to the table that the vast majority of creative overminds don’t: they are the progenitor of every concept they have ever used. When they approached videogames, this was turned on its side, but not its head. Take a closer look at the public’s response to Dawn of War II, and tell me if you can’t smell the fear on them. No bases? Fixed unit numbers and role-playing elements? The gamers who were expecting the next South Korean e-sport title revolted, and those standing in Space Marine cosplay outfits cheered. In order to truly translate a franchise from one medium to another, something needs to come across that isn’t simply another aesthetic example of loyalty to its source.

//In the grim darkness of the far future
When transferring over a valued intellectual property, especially when its eventual destination is an office full of eager developers, it becomes hard not to fear what will happen to the franchise to make it “game-worthy”. Space marines might suddenly develop heavy American accents, male Sisters of Battle may be inserted into the lore to make it more “gender-balanced” and thousands of people will flock to the forums to torch the ship before it even leaves the dock.

With Games Workshop, it’s always been slightly simpler. With the prospect of a 40000 MMO title looming in the rumour-populated wilderness, it comes down to the individual to decide whether they’re willing to trade in their rulers and dice for keyboards and mice. With the colossal numbers of Dawn of War II and Warhammer Online players, one could easily assume it’s easier to draw in new users simply because the ideas are original due to thirty years of copyright, rather than a wealth of inspiration on the part of the developers.

But it’ll always be more important to make sure those who were playing with Space Marines before the videogame are comfortable. George Lucas must have pined, once, for the audience that he lost when Episode One hit theatres, and that was simply a prequel in the same medium. Hopefully the high-quality videogame explorations of the Old World and the Imperium of Man will keep the folks in Nottingham from doing the same.