Is Warhammer 40,000 Becoming More Than Just a game?

Hello and welcome back to another weekly blog post. In my last post, I talked about the history of Warhammer 40,000 and some of the major changes that have happened over the years, but in this post I wanted to talk about a more recent and interesting change, which is how Warhammer 40,000 is expanding into a new medium.

As I mentioned in my previous post, a big change to Warhammer 40,000 was shifting the story to a more serious tone. It became much more dark and depressing, and coined the term “grimdark”. In fact, the term is actually now considered a subgenre of fantasy, defined as “A subgenre of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, or violent”. But this shift is what established Warhammer 40,000 as a setting, instead of just a game. Usually when a setting gets popular, it gets presented in a variety of different ways. For example, look at Star Wars. It started as a movie, and now they have TV shows, video games, books, and even a Star Wars miniature wargame.

So did that happen with Warhammer? Well, kind of. Books have been a big part of Warhammer since day one, because the rulebooks had all the story and other information as well as the rules. But soon after they made books specifically for telling stories in their popular setting, and nowadays there are way more of those released than rulebooks. For example, “The Horus Heresy” book series started in 2006 and has 56 books in it at the moment. And yes, they are all 400+ page novels.

Well, Warhammer is a tabletop game, so what about video games? There have been several Warhammer games over the years, but unlike other large franchises, they do not get regular releases. One of the most popular Warhammer 40,000 games at the moment is “Space Marine”, which released in 2011. However, there is a major Warhammer game coming later this year, called “Darktide”.

Now, with all these books and source material to choose from, surely they must have made a few film adaptations by now? Well, to give them credit, they did make an hour long animated film in 2010, but it hasn’t aged very well. But aside from that, there was nothing for 34 years, at least not officially. I say that because there have been a lot of fan animations, some of which look less like a fanmade thing and like something out of an actual studio. People were even suggesting that Games Workshop should hire them to make something. And then they did. Games Workshop picked up a bunch of animators, and then, in the last few weeks they announced a ton of animated projects, which will be under the name of Warhammer+, likely part of a streaming service like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. They won’t be out for a while, but it’s good that Games Workshop is going in a direction where they can explore even more possibilities with their franchise, and it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of it.

So, like I said at the beginning of this post, this is certainly a big change, but the opportunity for Warhammer to expand even further and become more mainstream could be even bigger, and who knows what could happen.

Well, that’s about it for this blog post, and remember to stay tuned.